Can this week be over yet?

Well, we didn't make it to Nathan's cataract appt yesterday. It has been rescheduled for monday afternoon.

It's never good when the phone rings at 6am. It's even worse to come up the stairs to see your husband on the phone and he tells you "your moms in the back of an ambulance, she fell and busted her knee" Crap.

I ask where they are taking her and he relays the question and I hear from across the room her yell at the poor paramedic "I'M NOT FLYING ANYWHERE!" Great. It's bad.

I finally get out of her that they are currently on their way to the hospital I work at, and things will be decided from there. So I call my brother and sister and get in the car and head off to the hospital.

After veryifying her information I go to her room and the doctor comes in with an xray showing her kneecap busted clean in half, with a 4 inch gap between the peices. "It's broke" he says while she huffs something that resembled a "no shit".

After a bit the ortho comes in and tells her they will do surgery asap. Surgery has a full schedule but he'll work her in sometime in the afternoon. They take her up to the floor and my sister and I (and later my brother) keep her company while we wait.

I always knew my mother was a tough cookie but she proved it taking no pain meds at all the entire day. My sister and I were quite sure we could use some ourselves.

Finally at 4:30 they come get her and we grab something to eat and settle into the surgery waiting loung to wait. At 7:30 the surgeon comes in and tells us that the xray, showing a nice break in 2 peices was very deceiving. To use his terminology "It was like a grenade went off" and "these are never easy injuries". He was able to use pins to secure the large peices and tied them all together with wire. There are still peices all over in there that he said would be ok to just settle where they will.

She was able to go home today. She isn't even allowed to bend the knee for 6-8 weeks while they wait for the bone to begin to mesh together. Then she'll start physical "bending" therapy to try to get it in useful shape again. He wanted her to be off work for 3 months but she convinced him to let her go back in a couple weeks as long as she could sit down. She's very worried about her job security as the company she works for is laying off. Fortunately she fell in the parking lot of her workplace that hadn't been cleared so she has a bit of a safety net there I suppose.

Since my brother and sister both live over an hour away it will be up to me to donate a lot of my time in helping my mother take care of herself. We'll make it work.

When it rains it pours!