The dreaded phone call

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Added: Wed. Nov 19, 2008 3:42pm
Posted in: Living

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Sometimes "growing bolder" means you have to stretch yourself in ways you hadn't thought imaginable just the day before.  I got the phone call we all dread, a late-afternoon alert that my 85 year old wheel-chair bound mother had fallen and fractured her thigh just above the knee, and my 85 year old dad with Parkinson's and issues of confusion couldn't be left alone.  And in my home town of Chicago, the youngest relative nearby to help out was 78. 

And so I left, and nearly three weeks later, will finally be going back home.  Both parents are now in the same nursing home while my mom recuperates and we all try to figure out how to get them back in their home.  But in the midst of it all, as I navigated the hospital and the house and my father's confusion and my mother's pain, I still wrote about it.  And for a window into that twilight of uncertainty before arrangements were made and beds were reserved and doctors were lined up and brought up to speed, when we took one day at a time and one "Gunsmoke" episode at a time and one drive through the old neighborhood at a time, turn to "Alles klar."