After the Fall

After my mother fell, there were complications, particularly because she was afraid to go to the hospital and my father was afraid to take her there.

Four years earlier, she'd had brain surgery as a result of a stroke. When she awoke from the anesthesia in the Intensive Care Unit at St. Barnabas hospital in Livingston, New Jersey, her first words were, "I'm never doing that again."

In their time together following the surgery, my father would hold her arm, and bear most of her weight, as they slowly walked a single lap around the high school running track. My mother told him that he was not ever to take her to the hospital again. And, he promised he wouldn't.

After the fall, with strict no-hospital orders in mind, my father took my mother instead to an emergency walk-in clinic where a young doctor embroidered the stitches on Ma's arm and prescribed a couple of antibiotics for infection and some strong pain killers.

I found out about the fall, by email, a few days later, at work. “Did you hear that your mother fell? It’s a bad one.” It was a note from my sister-in-law, Kay, who is married to my brother.

When I called the house, my mother couldn’t come to the phone. Then, my father told me about the pills. “The doctor said that when your mother’s arm hurts, I should give her a pill,” he said.

Dad was pushing dope to cope, though he couldn’t have seen it that way. He was liberally dosing my mother with what I believe was a Percodan-Biaxin highball that would quickly obliterate all the good bacteria in her intestines. The fall that should have landed her in the hospital didn’t, however, the medicine that was supposed to help her did. She developed raging colitis, which, for you and me means having non-stop diarrhea.

When I got to my parents house, I called 911.

Time Travelers

My mother, the rock, the matriarch, the center of our family universe, slipped and fell in her house on April 28, 2004, splitting open her forearm from elbow to wrist on the bolt of the lock on the bathroom door. The cut was so severe it required more than 50 stitches to close it. Had Ma been younger, this might have simply been a painful accident. But when she fell, my mother had just turned 80 and had been, we learned later, experiencing mini strokes for God knows how long.

At the time, I had two young children and two old parents, with more than seventy years separating them. But when Ma fell backward in her bathroom, she also tumbled backward in time. In one day, she erased seven decades and magically, horribly, instantly became another one of my children. something she never, ever wanted to be. So did my father, because when Ma fell, she took Daddy backward with her.

With each post, I'll tell a little more about our story and what it's like to be a sandwich generation foot soldier.