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.