Let’s start with my mother being seventy-nine. She’s a strong seventy-nine, but still she’s
actually closer to her eightieth birthday than the one she just passed. She has slowed down since her hip replacement
from four years ago, but still she gardens and walks, and now that my brother
has been away she’s living alone. Living
alone actually gives her less to do because when my brother and his wife are at
her house, she cooks and cleans for them as if she was forty years old and they
were teenagers. She’s one of those
tireless Italian ladies that just need to be doing something.
She lives about a half mile from my house. I stop there every day on my way home from
work, just for five or ten minutes to make sure everything is OK. In the spring and summer she’s usually in the
back gardening, and sometimes digging trenches and moving buckets of dirt. Half the time I shake my head and ask her
why. She just does. Sometimes after digging a trench where rain
puddles up, she’ll redo it if she doesn’t feel like it came out right. Some of our biggest arguments are over what I
see as meaningless heavy labor. She’s incorrigible. She’ll tell me this will be the last time and
I find out she did it again any way. Or
I just catch her at it.
I stopped there last Thursday and no one answered the
door. I knocked and rang the bell for
ten minutes. The side of the house was
nicely raked with dirt turned over. I
used my cell phone to call. I heard her
phone ring. Still there was no
answer. I keep her keys, and so decided
to open the door. I did and called
inside. No answer. At her age I worry about her collapsing and
either being unconscious or incapacitated.
I went through each room and she wasn’t anywhere to be found. I sighed.
The next possibility is she walked about a mile away to
where the commercial street resides. There
she could have gone to several stores.
Under typical conditions she would have planned walking there and being home
at the time I normally get home from work.
But there have been a few times where she didn’t plan that well and was out. Those times I drove toward that commercial boulevard
and found her walking along the way. She
would be grateful for the ride home. So
I drove and didn’t come across her. I
drove back and didn’t see her. I stopped
back in her house—nothing. I drove back
toward the boulevard again and this time I stopped at the little supermarket
where she might be. I walked through
every aisle—nothing. I gave up. I called my wife (at this point I was late
for home) and told her what had happened and that I was on my way home. I got about a block when my cell phone
rang.
“Are you Maria _____’s son?” asked the voice.
“Yes. Where is she?”
“The Emergency Room at Staten Island University Hospital.”
“What? What happened?
”
“Don’t worry. No need
to get worried. She fell.”
“How is she?”
“Don’t get alarmed.
It’s scratches and bruises and a dislocated finger. When can you get here?”
“I’ll be right there.
Ten, fifteen minutes.”
I called my wife and told her I was headed straight there,
raced over. The Emergency Room was packed and they had
beds in the aisles, and I found her in a bed in an aisle. She looked rather comfortable laying
there. Her right hand was wrapped and
she held it up. The doctor was happy to
see me. My mother doesn’t speak enough
English to really understand everything.
I guess they understood her since communication of pain is rather
easy. She had been there at least three
hours.
So what happened? She
had been raking the backyard and needed to put down grass seed. She had walked to that commercial boulevard to
the hardware store and bought grass seed.
When she was just a few blocks from home she just fell. She’s not sure why, but she fell forward
catching herself with her hands and apparently also taking the blow with her
chest. A couple living nearby saw her
fall, tried to help her up, but decided to call an ambulance. They even checked up on her at the
hospital.
Her chest hurt all the way around. They did an EKG and chest x-rays. Her heart was fine and no ribs were
broken. She had scratches and bruises on
her hands and legs. The tips of several
of her exposed fingers had band-aids. She
was grateful (with a weird sort of pride) that she did not scratch or hurt her
face. Her right hand had a splint with
bloody bandages. The doctor said she
dislocated at the mid knuckle. She came
in with the finger bent in the middle literally at a right angle outward. Yikes.
They had straightened it, and now they were going to stick it back into
the knuckle. When they unwrapped it I squirmed,
especially my face. The finger was
swollen double the size, the color of the skin looked pale grey, and there was
a slit down the inside that you could see into the finger. The doctor shoved the front half of the
finger into the back half. It wasn’t
going in right, so they needed to do it several times. Finally they got it in, then x-rayed again,
and then when they were happy, stitched the gaping wound.
They finally let her out around eight o’clock with a follow
up with a hand surgeon. As I helped her
with her coat, which had been lying on the hospital bed beside her, I noticed a
plastic shopping bag that was underneath the coat. I looked in the bag and it was a big bag of
grass seed. LOL! She still had the bag all this time,
ambulance ride and all. The white plastic
was smeared with blood.
You would think that would be the end of the story, but
no. I checked in on her the next day,
and there she was in the backyard, smeared with dirt, her right hand full of
bandages and inside a plastic bag to prevent it from getting dirty. “What the hell are you doing?” I
screamed. “I can’t believe you’re doing
this.” “I had to get the seed down,” she
explained. “It’s going to rain tomorrow.” And then she asked me to help her with her ice
pack. We walked inside and she sat
down. I assumed she had an ice pack
inside the bag around her hand. But she
lifted her pants leg up and had a wrap with ice around her calf.
“Is it swollen?” she asked.
It was slightly swollen.
“What happened here?”
“A dog bit me.”
“What?”
“A little dog. It bit
me.” She extended her arm and with her
other hand showed the length of the dog to be from her fingertips to the mid
forearm. “A little dog. No bigger than a rat. It bit me?”
“Where was this? In
front of the house?”
“No.”
So here’s what happened.
She walked back to the spot where she had fallen the day before. For what reason, God knows. To see if her blood was still there? To see if there was something in the sidewalk
that caused her to fall? She really didn’t
have an answer. While she was looking at
the concrete floor at the very spot she fell this little dog on a leash,
possibly on one of those extendable leashes, squirted up around her leg and bit
her calf. At the very spot she fell…LOL.
The dog’s owner was apologetic and what-not. But here she was now with a swollen leg and
two little fang piercings. My first
thought was, do I need to take her to the hospital? I was pretty sure she had a tetanus shot in
the last ten years, but could the dog possibly be rabid? Given the dog was with the owner and on a
leash, I figured it was fairly unlikely it was rabid. I did not want to go to the hospital
again. I put an antiseptic on the bite
marks, put a band-aid on that, and wrapped the ice pack again. I looked at her. “What is going on with you?” I had my hands up, almost appealing to
God. She had an embarrassed smirk on her
face. “I don’t know.”
So in the last week we met with the hand surgeon and she
will need an operation on the finger.
The front part of the finger won’t stay correctly. He will have to put pins in and reconstruct (I
think) the tendons. The operation will
be on the 17th. But since
then we’ve had pre-op testing, medical clearences from her general doctor and
from a cardiologist. Oy vey.
Here's a picture of my mother in her garden from several years ago. As you can see, she's into her gardening.
