So what kind of person broadsides a couple of old ladies coming home from a red hat ladies fashion show, at around 60MPH, causing a horrific 5 car pile up, only to seize the opportunity in the resulting melee to flee the scene? really fucked up people, that's who......
i've told you about my mudda, haven't i? i think i told you about her and my father....the two men in her life and such. did i tell you she was a prison guard for over a decade? did a fine job right up to the part when she was attacked and held hostage. [sigh] there are many many chapters not yet written by me or by the ole dame herself, but i sometimes get the feeling there are some mighty messed up karmic lessons for her. not that i want to go down that road, via the secret (god, can we please stop talking about that because i feel like when i do, that odd australian woman makes money and that alone makes my eye twitch a little) what i can tell you is this is exactly the kind of thing that happens to my mother. what things, you ask? let me preface:
my mother, for reasons relating to her history, is a bit of an archie bunker. i know, strange considering she's mexican but she has said more off color things than i can possibly count and would be a classic test case for understanding PTSD. to call her a cynic would make cynics look like a bunch of pussies (i know, bad word but it fits). but that same crazy resolve is also what has gotten her through the roughest of rough patches and i have an extreme admiration for her ability to, no pun intended, roll with the punches....but let's not get off track here. cliff notes...right.
felony hit and run. her 76 year old passenger was mere inches away from being a fatality. young asian driver, she says, with an emphasis on asian. she would not get in the ambulance until they retrieved two very large red hats adorned with very large purple ostrich feathers she purchased at this event. the ER is full of inmates because there was a riot at Wayside. the thugs require private rooms with guards so she's put in a hallway for about 4 hours across from a corrections officer that had a teargas grenade go off in his hand. that had much to talk about over the bloody stump that was his hand. she was chock o block with morphine and somehow managing to get herself up to use the bathroom several times. the xray was somehow clear and they were about to discharge her when i threw a little fit. one CT scan later, they were very gently admitting her for a nasty compression fracture of lumbar vertebra number 3. everywhere they wheeled her, she took her very large hats, propped on on her body so the gurney looked like some bizarre red hat lady float making it's rounds through the facility. this was met with some fanfare and each squeal was met with my moms little hand shooting up in the air in the best of pageant waves. the admitting nurse was in her mid sixties, a bit daffy and wearing a wig that can only be described as perhaps her favorite stuffed animal as a child that she gutted and ceremoniously wears on her head. she asked her every single question on the admitting form and had to repeat everything at least twice because she spoke no louder than a whisper and my mom is deaf as a pot. then by morning her nurse was a very sweet, southern, black man that she liked because he always addressed her as Ma'am but as the shift wore on, so did her courtesy and by change of shift, was accusing him of trying to see her naked. by mid day the next day when she was complaining about the Filipino nurse not speaking english, i felt like saying out loud to the room,
"karma? mom."
"mom, this is karma. keep eachother company because it's going to be a long week"
she refused a common procedure (vertebroplasty) because she thought the doctor was pressuring her like a car salesman. insisted on getting back to her own town and own doctor even though Henry Mayo was a better choice for care. only the words she chose were vicious, entitled and quite embarrassing. by the end of the week, no one wanted to deal with her and she was left on a bedpan for about two hours the last night there. it was a two hour ambulance drive home and i can only say, i'm thankful i was not in that rig.
she was transferred wednesday to a skilled nursing facility that she insisted on based on a memory of it 30 years ago. to say this place is a shithole, gives shitholes a bad name. the first night as i'm standing at the end of her antique medical bed, i turn to see a rail thin woman well into her 90's, dressed in a hospital gown and diaper, cross her room, reach out for something on the dresser and go down with a sickening slap on the linoleum. i ran across the hall, pushed the nurses call button and waited for someone to come. i begged her to lay still but when no one came i ran down the hall. a couple of nurse arrived to lift her back to bed. half an hour later, the family arrived and i watched the nurses and administrators lie to them for about three minutes and then i stepped in. [another story...another time]
we were all hoping for a rehab center. the kind that specialize in higher functioning folks. hip and knee replacements, spinal injuries and the occasional head trauma but ya know, she has made her decisions and i can only stand by and watch the second car wreck in a week. only this one is slow motion. all the while my mother wants me....only me, to handle all her affairs. she doesn't trust my sisters because she hated their father. perhaps i'm not seeing the bigger picture and this is exactly the kind of place she needs to be. i don't know....my vision is a bit blurred by all the crying...oh....
in all of my waiting for this doctor and that doctor and my sisters to arrive, i read Water for Elephants. bad idea. re-reading Running With Scissors would have been much more comforting.
i'm so very tired all of a sudden....
