When it rains......

I can't seem to be able to find time lately to update this blog. Things have been rather chaotic of late, particularly in the past few weeks. A week ago yesterday, my mom and I followed an annual tradition of going down to St. Joseph Catholic Church in Suffield for their yearly Lenten fish fry dinner. We arrived, had a lovely dinner and as we were leaving, my mom fell and fractured her left hip. She had to be transported to the hospital by ambulance and I drove myself there after driving to her house to find some sort of updated insurance information that she needed. Fortunately, my brother walked in around that time and told me he'd look for it and to go ahead and drive over to the hospital and he'd call me there with the information I needed to get to our mom so that everything could be properly billed. So drive over I did, and spent the rest of the evening there waiting...and waiting......and waiting some more, for someone to see her. They apparently X-rayed her before I arrived and a doctor did finally come in to inform us that yes, she had fractured her hip. She was in terrible pain after a while and I wandered the corridors trying to find someone to help her.

Oddly, for a Friday night, the ER was deserted and there was nary a soul around to ask for help. Desks were empty, doctors and nurses were conspicuosly absent and it took me forever to find someone who might be able to give her some pain medication to ease her discomfort. I was finally able to locate someone after wandering hallways in search of assistance but I found the lack of staff in the ER on a weekend night to be most odd and quite disturbing. I know that the economy has forced the hospital to layoff quite a few staff (a fact I find quite odd, given the never-ending need for health care professionals), but an emergency room is not someplace that can afford to have too few staff to care for patients. I suppose if it had been a life-or-death emergency that they'd've found the people to tend her, but I suspect they probably viewed her as just another elderly hip fracture patient, something they probably get plenty of on a weekly basis, since it is the most common injury in elderly populations due to falls.

But for an elderly and fragile person, hip fractures can be a matter of life or death. They are the number one cause of death in elderly people, a fact that my mom's surgeon made pointedly clear to me the next morning when I spoke to him. So if this is the case, why, when she was brought in by ambulance, was it so hard to find ER staff that night? Do they run on a skeleton staff on weekends and evenings? People don't get sick or hurt 9-5 on weekdays, but maybe it's hard to find people willing to work those sorts of odd hours. Still, if you go into the health care fields and intend to work in a hospital, you'd better be darned prepared to work lots of evening and weekend hours, particularly if you work in emergency medicine.

My mom underwent a partial hip replacement surgery early Sunday morning and was released from the hospital and transferred to a nursing home/rehab center on Thursday, where she's is currently recuperating. The thing that bugs me about the place is that they have no physical therapy staff available on weekends, and a successful recovery from an injury and surgery of this sort depends on daily therapy, not just Monday through Friday therapy. They also removed the TVs from the rooms due to theft and do not provide telephones, either. To cut off access to the outside world for their elderly patients seems somehow cruel. Elderly people are isolated as it is, but to deny them telephone and TV access seems somehow overly cruel. If you want a TV or a phone, you have to bring your own. My mom has her cell phone with her and my brother is going to bring over a TV for her today. She can't concentrate enough to read a book, which is a shame, because I have been bringing her a lot of really good books in Large Print lately and the one she was in the middle of reading is really good, but she doesn't feel well enough yet to resume reading. So television is the only outlet for entertainment for her right now, so I am glad that my brother will be bringing her one today so that she doesn't go stir crazy from boredom. Hopefully her stay there will not be too long and I hope that she'll at least be able to be home by Easter in a couple of weeks. We'll have to figure out what to do in the way of Easter dinner, though, because she won't feel up to cooking it herself. Guess we'll cross that bridge when we get to it!