Old age is no place for sissies. -Bette Davis
I recently spent most of a day in an emergency room in south Florida. My mother fell, hit her head, acquired a lump on her forehead the size of Brazil, and needed immediate medical attention. We helped her into the car and drove her straight to the nearest emergency room.
Spending time in an ER guarantees two things. One, you’re going to wait. And two, you’re going to see things while you wait that will break your heart and restore your faith in humanity, in equal measure.
Since my mom lives in Florida, there are a lot of elderly residents. Ninety percent of the patients waiting to be seen were 70 or older. Many had fallen, just like my mother. Most were accompanied by family members. One or two were by themselves.
And I realised as I waited how terribly fragile we become as we age. Bones get brittle. Balance fails. Things we rely on and take for granted all our lives – our eyesight, our hearing, our memory – begin to betray us. Friends and family members die off, one by one. Taking care of a house becomes difficult, then impossible. Someone has to cut our grass, drive us to the grocery store, dole out our medications.
As I sat in the curtained alcove next to my mother’s bed, I waited, and listened. I heard fragments of conversation, occasional moans of pain, complaints, even a few jokes, like random rays of sunshine in the linoleum-floored ER.
“Don’t you worry about the hospital bill, grandma,” one patient’s granddaughter reassured her in a thick New York accent. “We’ll take care of it. We’ll just live in a box down by the river.”
“So you fell, grandma?” her grandson said. “Did it knock some sense into you?”
“When are they gonna feed me?” a woman in a wheelchair querulously demanded. “I need to be fed!”
“You’re not supposed to eat,” the floor nurse informed her, “because we’re still waiting on your test results. But I’ll let you have some graham crackers and juice, and I’ll get your husband a chicken salad sandwich. How does that sound?”
“Why does he get a chicken salad sandwich and I only get crackers and juice?” the woman snapped. “Bastard.”
The woman next to us also took a fall and injured her arm. She was waiting to see if the bone was fractured, and to find out if she’d be going back home or staying overnight.
The good news was, there was no fracture. She could go home. The bad news was, there was no one to take her there. She called several friends, fumbling with her mobile, asking with steadily increasing desperation if one of them could pick her up. No one – including her home health care nurse – could come and get her. The floor nurse eventually arranged for a volunteer ambulance driver to come and get her and bring her home.
Where, I found myself wondering, was this woman’s family? How terrible to be alone with no one to help her when she needed it most.
An hour or so later, the test results for Mrs Crackers-and-Juice came back; the doctor said she was okay and free to go home. Before she was wheeled away by her husband, she stopped to say her goodbyes to the various nurses, orderlies, and volunteers who had helped her.
Just before she left, she told the nurses in parting, “Thank you all so much! You’ve been wonderful. I hope I never see you again.”
The entire ER erupted in laughter. “We hope so, too,” one of the nurses said with a smile. “Now go home. And don’t come back.”
