After the Fall

Today we’ll have a little hiatus from the usual froth.  I’m scheduled to blog today, and blog I shall, but I don’t have a ready supply of sass to draw upon.

Yesterday I came home to the usual seriocomic voice mail message from my mother.  My birthday is approaching, and on Sunday she twisted my arm until I made a request for a gift.  I made up something on the fly (the odd kind of sheets I like, the kind I figured she could get at any Bed Bath & Beyond, which we don’t have around here), and she was calling in a minor panic because the sheets in question could not be had for love or money.  I called her back around 6:00, but got no answer.

At 8:00 or so I got a call from the home phone and picked up, assuming she was calling to extort a new request.  Instead it was my brother, calling to inform me that my mother’s had another fall.

She’s not the oldest creature in the world, but she may be among the most fragile.  She’s 5′2, perhaps, and weighs less than 100 pounds.  She smoked for over fifty years, and emphysema has done a number on her.  For the past few years she’s been rolling around with a walker and an oxygen tank, and over the past two years she’s taken a couple of spills that have laid her up for a spell.

This particular spill was worse than usual.  There’s no telling what happened–whether she tripped over her tubing, blacked out, or the like–but tumble she did, breaking her hip, her wrist, her shoulder.  When I spoke with my brother last night the doctors had decided to postpone surgery on the shoulder and hip, primarily because she is so small and fragile.  They might have worked on the wrist, but her bones are so soft and porous that they feared they could not use pins to secure them as they might have liked to.  I’m still waiting on news–they had not yet assigned her a room, and I’m not even sure what hopsital she’s in at the moment.  There’s precious little I can do, of course, but I’d like to cheer her a bit if I can.

In some ways the injuries are incidental:  she’s a tough one, and she heals remarkably well considering the way she’s treated her body.  The recuperation, however, will exact a pretty steep price this time around.  I visited my mother last September, when she was laid up from a knee injury and awaiting the results of a biopsy.  She was about as miserable as I’ve ever seen her, curled up in her chair and morose as could be.  Worse still, while she’s not exactly a hypochondriac, she’s a terribly fearful, fretful personality:  her way of managing risk is not to take it.  Accordingly, at that point in time she was staying put as much as possible, and when physical therapists got into the act she resisted them, if only because they kept pressuring her to exert herself as PTs are wont to do.  Her sphere had become pretty small, but over the past several months she’s been radiating outward, growing a bit more confident and a bit more mobile.  I’m not sure how this injury will impact her in the short- and long-term, but I know the rehab from a broken hip is arduous.  I don’t think she’ll take to it well.

I try to be both philosophical and pragmatic when these things occur.  Realistically, there’s nothing I can do whatsoever except call and be supportive and encouraging when she’s feeling well enough to use the phone.  I agonized over last September’s trip, since it felt far more funereal than it needed to be.  I hated seeing my mother diminished as she was, and any pleasure she derived from my visit was probably compromised by my necessarily early departure.  I was happy to see her, happy that the visit gave her some small satisfaction, but happier still to come home again. 

I felt badly about that, and I suppose I still do, but home is where I am nowadays; where I come from seems increasingly incidental.  My mother understands that, and under the circumstances that’s all that really matters.