Seriously.   As they age, they need to SLOW THE FUCK DOWN.  As their bodies get older, they get slower, and their reactions slow down, and their bones get more brittle.  If they keep trying to go at the speed that used to be "normal" they WILL eventually miss a step.

Guess who has two thumbs, and got called at 2 AM last Tuesday morning to tell him his mom fell at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and broke her fucking hip, and had to have immediate surgery?

This guy.  


The last ten days has been nothing but rushing to Manhattan, dealing with insurance companies, buying walkers, arranging physical therapy, renting minivans, buying toilet risers, talking to doctors, arranging in-home nurses, buying hip kits, emptying bed pans, helping an old lady get dressed, being around 24-7 in case anything happens, missing work, etc.

And that's just how I feel.  Imagine how my poor elderly mother feels?  She's filled with pain, cannot walk, cannot do simple things like put on pants or socks, feels guilty about disrupting my life, is stranded far away from her home in Europe, is frustrated at the slow pace of rehabilitation, is trapped in the house and bored off her ass, etc.

AVOID ALL OF THIS.  TELL YOUR ELDERLY PARENTS TO SLOW DOWN AND TAKE THEIR TIME


The only bright side of all of this is how good the technology is.  Holy crap - they replaced her hip on Tuesday and discharged her from the hospital Friday.  Wow!  

Her stubbornness and impatience is absolutely HELPING her rehabilitation , BUT as she is re-learning how to walk, and how to handle stairs, and how to get up without dislocating her new hip, it is actually super-important that she is SLOW and deliberate, and doesn't get impatient.

Thanks , but there are no trips to manhattan.  We drove her down to DC last Friday.  She is living in the guest wing of our house, with physical therapy and nurses coming to the house and me staying home from work every day (thank God I am a tenured professor ).  She's seeing an orthopedic doc tomorrow for a follow-up and to give her an idea of when she can fly home.

My guess is that she'll be here for another week at least.

Thanks.

In a perverse way, I am pleased that IF she was going to fall, it was in NY, which is reasonably close to DC where I live, as opposed to Spian which is really far away.

OMG!   I hope she recovered!!

That's what I keep telling her, as we practice going up and down stairs.  



Thanks!  

Wow.  Living to be 100 is amazing, espcially after that!  

My mom also hit her head when she fell at the opera, but didn't get a concussion or edema, just tons of blood.  The brusing on her hip, and the sheer number of staples they put in, is something to behold!  

Thanks

She'll be fine.

She was getting cabin fever today - she's been trapped in the house for a week, since gettng out of the hospital - so we practiced going down the stairs and getting in/out of the car, and then we took a nice long drive to the Shenandoah Park and Skyline Drive to get out of the house.  

Yes, it has been "complicated" to put it mildly

I've spent a lot of time on international phone calls, and talking to billing people at the hospital, and emailing back and forth with her European insurance company (who don't understand HIPAA, and got super-frustrated that the NYC hospital wouldn't just send them her medical records), and trying to arrange home nursing and PT without US insurance.

Thanks for the thought (and the prayers) ... it's a good point to consider.  But, in her case, she seems to have definitely fallen and broken the hip as a result.

I went to the Metropolitan Opera, and talked to the head of security who had seen the video tapes, and he agreed the she simply was going up the stairs, and missed the top step, and then cracked her head, and then tumbled down the entire flight of stairs.  So it was clearly the fall that broke her hip, not the other way around.  My mom also admitted that she was in a hurry, and was probably going too fast.