One Fall, One Broken Hip, and One Stroke Equals WTF?
I need to bang my head against the wall until it stops hurting.
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The day started out as a typical Friday. My husband walked our little yappy dogs. He emptied the dishwasher. He played guitar, and he let me sleep until my internal alarm clock woke me up.
I was putting away the toilet paper order from Sam’s. I normally wouldn’t mention this, but 45 mega rolls is more than I thought I ordered. I heard my husband shuffle down the hall to his man cave, then I heard him shout, “HONEY! I CAN’T GET UP!”
I jumped over the toilet paper rolls still stacked on the floor and ran to his room. He was all crumpled up, laying on the floor. I gave the floor a quick look for blood and was relieved not to see any this time. I asked him if he needed help getting up. That’s when he said, “Yeah. I need help. I think I broke my hip.”
It was a struggle to get him vertical. He wanted to go into the bathroom, but there was no way he could walk there. I helped him sit on his rolling walker with the seat, but even that was painful.
I asked him if he wanted to go to the nearby Urgent Care. He told me that wouldn’t be enough, he needed the Emergency Room at the hospital. I dialed 911, and an ambulance with three emergency medical technicians showed up to take my husband to the hospital.
Our dogs needed to be walked because I knew I’d be gone for hours once I got to the ER. The full cup of coffee spilled on the man cave floor needed mopped up because the Miniature Schnauzer wasn’t cleaning it fast enough.
My phone rang thirty minutes later. It was John’s doctor in the Emergency Room. He asked if my husband’s speech was hard to understand before he fell. No, it was fine. The doctor said he suspected that my husband had a stroke. He said everything was fine when my husband was admitted, even singing to all the nurses like he always does. All of a sudden, it was hard for the hospital staff to understand him.
It’s amazing that I didn’t pass out from all of the deep breathing I did while driving to the hospital. The flashbacks from eleven years ago were flooding my brain…my husband’s twenty-one day coma, the ups and downs of living my own version of the movie “Groundhog Day,” his ten weeks of being weaned off a ventilator, and four months of Polytrauma rehab. It took a lot of prayers to God and faith that he’d get well enough to come home.
Here’s to praying that we don’t have to do that shit again.
If caregiving was easy, everyone would be doing it.
