Making And/Or Keeping Promises

So, DOB fell again. Not once all of 2010. Well, once, but we were able to pick her up because we discovered her pretty soon after she fell.

Sunday’s event began sometime in the wee hours of the morning, when, as near as I can reconstruct from the only eyewitness whose mentis isn’t very compos lately, she went outside to hang a wet towel to dry because I would be in to pick up her dirty laundry. Wait, what? She wanted to dry a towel before I picked it up to wash?

So, I enter, unsuspecting, around ten am to pick up her laundry…

DOB:  Blah blah (the minute I open the door. Never mind that she knows I can’t hear when she whispers)

UCC:  Yikes! You fell!

DOB: (from the middle of the room where she is sprawled in what can most generously be described as an unladylike pose) I pulled a boner.

WISIMN: No shit. Now, you’ll repeat incoherent snatches of a story of how you came to be where you so gracefully are.

DOB: I don’t know what happened….

WISIMH: Bless your little heart, you never do. Do you, dear?

DOB: … I opened the door to hang a towel on the rack outside…  where towels go to dry?... must have fallen. Don’t know what happened, except that I fell outside when I went to hang up a towel. Or something. Anyway…

UCC:   Stay right there, I’ll get him.

DOB:  Ok, I pulled a boner when I blah blah (trailing off as I leave the room to summon her son)

UCC:  Take a hit of abuterol. She’s down.

TCG gradually, with much huffing and puffing and what?-ing, trails me as I return to where I left off in DOB’s conversation, fortunately not missing any important plot twists or story recounting.

Scroll ahead an hour later, as we give up after trying to explain, then demonstrate, then listen and repeat trying to get the old lady on her knees so we can flip her butt up into a chair. She can’t fucking figure out how to do that, amid babbling about the towel and the open door and the boner she’s pulled. Ibid. Ibid. When we actually did get her in the right position at one point, and then we tried to lift one under each arm, she goes all passive resistance and dead weight as soon as we ask her to heave ho.

TCG has called his friends at 911, explaining calmly that we need “lift assist” and this is not a medical emergency. Then, I walk down to the street to meet them and walk them up to her room, explaining that she seems fine and TCG has COPD.

Of course, despite having discussed this at some length before their arrival and decided when they made the inevitable offer to take her to the ER to be sure she didn’t have a fucking stroke we would graciously decline, she of course, said yup take me in to the hospital.

WISIMH: Why did I not see this coming? These people have the follow-through of a broken toaster and slightly less initiative and cognitive powers.

After sitting in a corridor of the ER watching them bring in stretcher after stretcher of old homeless men/women who probably only needed a meal and a warm bed and a nap, and realizing they were VERY busy, I came to a stopping place in my book and finished my thermos of coffee and ate my apple, the later only after moving several chairs down the row from DOB’s wheeled chair, far enough to diminish the smell of ripe urine enough to swallow bites of apple. Then:

UCC:  We don’t have to stay here, you know. Mother may be hungry, and may need to change her diaper, and may feel just fine now, and besides the day’s half over and I didn’t get the first load of laundry in and several more ibids and ibids while we gravely considered our options and checklists.

Rolling out DOB in the wheelchair while TCG tags along in his walker so I have to open doors, I leave them on the curb and walk a few blocks to where I parked after dropping TCG at the ER door. We get home.

DOB:  I don’t know what happened, ibid, ibid and fucking ibid.

TCG:  Huff and puff and glad we didn’t stay.

WISIMN:  Yeah, now I can get back to the laundry, after I make lunch for DOB, make sure she takes her pills, take my own pills, and perform the standard checklist of one-on-one attention TCG requires after stressful event like this. Note: the checklist doesn’t include a reminder about how we agreed the next time she goes to the hospital, we’re not bringing her back into our house. Oh, wait. I remember now. You will conveniently ignore that with the same degree of expertise you ignore anyfuckingthing else I ask you to actually fuckingDO.