Cluster F*ck

I am not at home.  I will be living at my mother's house for an untold amount of time now.  I miss home.  The sounds, the smells, the views, the textures are all different, of course.  Sky sent a sweet note, and I don't think she meant it as a swipe, but she said, in essence, that I was a man of comfort and routine--something like that.  Maybe that is simply the way I took it.  It has become true, of course, since I retired, lost my girl, and suffered through the Covid isolation.  What else was there for me to do but invest myself in enjoying the fruits of my labor, the richness of my home?  Yes. . . I developed rituals.  

And none of them follow me to my mother's house.  

Selavy.  

I am exhausted, but maybe I can give a brief synopsis of what happened since my mother fell.  She was in her garage getting the groceries out of the car.  She went down.  She called me. 

"I fell again," she said in a low voice.  

It was 1:45.  I jumped into the car and drove over right away.  When I got to her house, she said she wanted to call 911 because she would get in faster.  O.K.  

Forty minutes later, the ambulance showed up.  They asked my mother which hospital she wanted to go to.  She said the closest one to her house. 

That was the first mistake, and I should never have let it happen.  

They loaded her into the ambulance as the neighbors came around to see what was going on.  They wanted to talk to me, to know what happened, to give their opinions and tell me that if there was anything they could do. . . .  It took me a bit to get them satisfied and to lock the house up.  

When I got to the E.R. they told me to wait and when my mother was in a room, they would let me know.  

It was three o'clock when I entered room 117.  Remember the time. 

A nurse came in and took my mother's vitals.  She said Dr. Marvel would be in to see her in a moment.  

"You made that up," I said.  

"No.  That's her name.  Madison Marvel."  

I've decided to change the name here.  Her real name was even more spectacular and surprising and one I can't imagine anyone else having.  But. . . I can't reveal it and then say what I am going to say.  

I took out my phone and Googled her.  She was young.  She was beautiful.  She had graduated from my own alma mater med school in 2022.  Yikes.  She was a sports medicine doc who trained in the ER program at the other major hospital group in town.  She was not affiliated with either system which made me wonder if she had passed her boards yet.  Doctors have seven years to pass before they are not allowed to practice any longer.  I know this from dating a neurosurgeon who had not yet passed her boards for a bit.  

Dr. Marvel was very sweet to my mother, but I'll skip to the chase.  We sat in the room a very long time waiting for my mother to be taken for Xrays, then even longer before the doc came back.  My mother had a compound fracture of the radial bone.  The doc was going to try to move the bones back into place.  They gave my mother a shot of morphine, something for anxiety, and a Tylenol drip.  At that time, my mother's blood pressure was outrageous, 205/100.  Dr. Marvel said that it was going to hurt a bit, but she would give my mother a lidocaine block to help.  

My mother had fallen decades ago and broken her other wrist.  That was another horrible day.  I took her to the E.R. and she lay on a gurney for hours.  They could not find a doctor, they said, who took her insurance.  They said we could wait until one showed up or we could drive across town to a doctor who would see her.  I put her back in my open Jeep and we bounced our way through traffic.  

Skip ahead.  That doctor had a machine that had Chinese finger handcuffs and a crank.  He strapped her arm down, put her fingers in the handcuffs, then cranked the handle pulling my mother's hand upward.  I watched the bone move and heard the popping.  I almost passed out.  

"That was absolutely medieval," I said.  

"No. . . I gave her something to reduce the pain."

I told this story to Dr. Marvel who listened to it wide-eyed and disbelieving.  She might not have even been born, though, when this story took place.  

Dr. Marvel got everything ready.  She had a syringe with the lidocaine and put into my mother's wrist.  I was watching as she moved it around and around as if searching for something for quite awhile, occasionally pushing the plunger a tiny bit.  

"Can you feel the bone?" I asked.  

She looked at me.  

"Yes," she said.  "You see the blood in the syringe?"

I had already noticed it and had thought of the way a junkie will sometimes reboot heroin by pushing the plunger then pulling it back and re-injecting again.  Blood, of course, comes back into the syringe.  But I didn't mention that.  

All of the sudden, my mother began to fade.  The doctor asked her if she was o.k. but she didn't respond.  

"Do you have pain in your chest?" she asked.  

My mother mumbled.  

"Do you have numbness in your legs?"

No response.

"Do you feel a tingling in your lips?"

My mother kind of nodded.  I was watching the doctor's eyes.  They were telling the story.  The alarms were going off on the monitor.  My mother's heart rate dropped into the thirties.  The doctor seemed uncertain, then ordered some atropine and a defibrillator.  My mother looked like she had fallen asleep.  My adrenaline was pumping.  One of he nurses asked if the doctor wanted to hook my mother up to some electrolytes.  The doc said yes and left the room.  In a moment, the nurse put a gallon bag on the hanger and hooked my mother up.  Then everyone left.  

Wait and see, they said.  

When they were gone, I asked my mother to give me her hand.  "Mom. . . let's do some breathing exercises, o.k.  Deep breaths, hold, and then a long exhale."  I did them with her.  Her heart rate and O2 levels started coming up into the 40s.  "Good girl. .  .that's working.  Let's just do some more, slowly.  Just relax, don't try.  Just think about your breath."  Holy shit. . . bp in the 50s.  My mother was coming to.  

"How are you feeling?"  

"O.K". "

Did you pass out?"  

"I don't know," she said.  "I just felt sleepy."  

"O.K.  Let's do some more breathing."  

I massaged her neck and her scrawny shoulder.  I could feel the metal plates and bolts that held it together.  We breathed.  Heart rate 60s, then 70.  O2 levels normal.  

I'm not claiming anything.  I'm just telling what happened.  I am not claiming some mystical hippie shaman stuff.  Maybe it was the electrolytes.  Maybe this would have happened anyway.  But this is what happened.  

We didn't see the doc again for over an hour.  When she came back, she said she had been in touch with an orthopedic surgeon.  She wasn't going to try the block again and wasn't going to manipulate the bones back into place.  The orthopedic doctor said at 93 my mother's skin was thin and there was a chance of the bone coming through and that would be an even bigger problem.  She was just going to put my mother in the finger trap and let her arm hang and let gravity do some work.  

Another hour before the nurses rolled in an IV pole with the Chinese finger trap I had already mentioned attached.  The pole had no brake on the wheels, though, and they pondered how to keep it from moving.  They got a tourniquet and tied it to the bottom rail of the bed.  I could tell none of them had ever done this before.  

"I think this will work," one nurse said to another.  

When Dr. Marvel returned, she stood and looked for awhile, then tried to put my mother's fingers into the trap.  They fell out.  She tried again.  Success.  

"We'll let this hang for awhile and let gravity do its work," she said.  Everyone left.  There was a shift change.  A new nurse came in and introduced herself.  I told her I'd made a big mistake bringing my mother here.  "I should have taken her to the big hospitall," I said.  "They would have had an orthopedic surgeon there, wouldn't they?"  She shook her head.  "We are small and just don't have the staff," she said, then. . . "but you didn't hear it from me."  

It was now ten p.m.  I'd been sitting and fretting for seven hours.  I asked if there was a cafeteria.  It wasn't a cafeteria as one would know it.  It was a fast food joint with a tray of old pizza and some fried chicken fingers.  There were a lot of chips and candy and muffins.  I got a coffee and a protein bar and went back to the room.  

At eleven, Dr. Marvel came in.  She had an idea.  They were going to add some weights.  She left and the nurses came in with the weights and started futzing around trying to figure out what to do.  They got some ribbons and looped them around my mother's bicep, then tied the other end to the weights.  They had no idea what they were doing.  The weights lay on the ground with the ribbon attached.  There was no way to raise them.  They were trying to recreate the medieval machine action I had mentioned before.  It was a real cluster fuck.  

My mother lay like this for another long spell.  At 12:30, Dr. Marvel returned with nurses.  

"This looks better, don't you think?" she queried the nurses with a bit of a vocal fry and uptalk in her voice.  

"Sure," I said, "the blood has drained from her hand to her elbow," I said, "so the swelling has been reduced."  

They took off the finger trap.  

"We are going to put a partial splint on this to keep it in place.  We're not going to manipulate it.  The orthopedic surgeon said that she wouldn't recommend surgery at your age.  Well just keep it in the splint and let it heal.  It won't be perfect," she said.  

What? WTF?!?  This was it?  My mother hadn't even seen an orthopedic doctor yet.  Why?

It turned out that they didn't have orthopedics at this hospital.  

Even putting on the splint was a cluster fuck.  The material hardened and they struggled to get it into shape and cut it.  

I walked out of the room with Dr. Marvel.  "You are going to keep her overnight, right?"

"No, I don't have to.  I can release her to go home."

I looked at her.  "I don't feel comfortable just taking her home.  I think she needs to be monitored tonight."

"OK.  I can admit her, sure."

But they couldn't find a room.  The hospital was full, they said.  

At one-thirty, we were just waiting for a room to open up.  They didn't get my mother into a room until 4:30.  And it wasn't a hospital room.  The horror story goes on. . . but not today.  My mother is up.  I need to get to work.  And so. . . .