Blog from the end of the world

A week ago I woke to hear my husband say my mom had fallen in the ealry morning and the middle son had carried her back to bed. That would be the one with the newly repaired ACL. So I maturely went shopping all day looking for something festive to go with my new red shoes.  We did check in by phone via the eldest son on Grandma but forgot to ask when told she was fine if she could move. She kept telling him she was fine but ... So stuff, calls, ERs, etc. xrays. End of story (world, whatever) she had broken her pelvis on one side and her sacrum and none of it is treatable and lots more stuff and here she was the next day with her straw in the side of the cup invention so she didn't have to tilt it and raise her arm too high. Since I had shopped and then ERed all day I had only heard Christmas songs on the radio and she starts too ramble about terrible shootings and children and I knew, we knew, she was losing it. Lying there in pain all day she had confused some tv movie and the mall shooting and was muddled from the pain and fatigue. I pretty much told her so. And then she said "I'll bet you a nickel," and I wasn't so sure. She never bets unless she's right.

   Still the medical types asked her who the president was at every opportunity, and, as seen in the picture, even on morphine she was clever. At least until no one checked her oxygen sats -or just didn't follow up on the low ones Sunday and the percoset made her loopy and she went from telling us what was going on in the world to no memory of where she was or why these terrible "harpies" (her vocabulary has yet to fail her) were torturing her. Then I got the flu. This is all so minor. But my clever, funny, loving mother angry and fearful and lost and confused, whispering the pain is "a ten, ten" might as well be the end of the world. Just a little world I know, and only mine, and near the end in any case. Just spinning a bit out of control. Or maybe it's the flu... 

 

 So now things are a bit more stable and she is less loopy and I am more and the world didn't end today (yet).