How Tough Is My Mom?

     The call came in late Saturday afternoon.  I was asleep at the time, having laid down 'cos I didn't feel so hot and found sleep had been lurking in the mattress like an octopus under a flat rock.

     Its tentacles were still wrapped around me when my cellphone started ringing.  I struggled awake, but too late.  The CALL button will show a list of calls mad and received and the last one was--  My Mom's number.  Huh.

     I hit CALL again and it rang once.  Mom picked up with, "Hello."

     "Hi, Mom.  How are you?"

     "Not too good.  I fell and hit my head on a cabinet on the way down.  It's bleeding quite a lot and I don't think I should try to stand up by myself."

     "Have you called 9-1-1?"

     "Well, no.  Do you think I should?  I was hoping you could come up--"

     "I'm on my way, but I want you to call 911 as soon as I hang up, okay?  Please!"

     "Well, okay."

     It's about ten minutes to her house, driveway-to-driveway.  I dug around for my glasses, frantically moved things from the small weekend purse to the big general purpose one, grabbed a hoodie, put on shoes, headed out the back door, came back in for a garage door opener, got to my car, called both siblings and a nephew on the way and made it in five.  The crew from the local firehouse was there already, had her on a backboard and in a neck brace "just in case" and were cleaning up the blood, of which there was rather more than you might think. (One ambulance, one fire truck, what seemed to be a blue dozen physically-fit and incredibly helpful young men.  They've been there before, once when we had to break in, and they know the drill.)

     After making sure where they were taking her, I finished the clean-up (light-tan carpet -- not a whole lot I can do in the way of emergency medical treatment but I could at least prevent that from worrying Mom!) and followed.  My sister was already at the hospital and my brother showed up soon after.  Nurses, docs, clean-up, a really fine staple-job on her injury, medical history, hands-on checking for additional injury: the usual drill, including CT scans and X-rays--

     "Mrs. X?  I'm Doctor Eeeyar and Dr. Wu* is working with me today.  We've gone over your X-rays and it looks like you'll be staying with us awhile."

     "Oh?"

      "Yes, you've broken your C2 vertebra and a pretty good job of it, too." 

     "Oh, my."
*  *  *      Let's review: My Mom fell, cut her scalp badly, broke her neck, scooted and crawled six feet to get a dishtowel to apply pressure to the wound, hauled herself another six feet to yank a telephone from the breakfast bar, called me, left a message, and answered calmly when I called back.  She's been conscious, calm and managing a lot of pain through the entire ordeal  --She's 82.  Do not cross her.
*  *  *
     Back in the ER, it was sounding grim.  They'd paged in the on-call neurosurgeon and were using terms like  "unstable fracture" and double-checking for numbness and muscle control while they were finding her a room in Neuro ICU.  C2, or the "axis," is an important part of the machinery; it's what your head pivots side-to-side on, with broad bearing surfaces and a little "pin" at the front that engages C1.  A common C2 injury is known as a "hangman's fracture;" it's what happens if you don't wear your seat belt and catch the steering wheel under your chin in a collision.  Or so Wikipedia told me at the time.

     It was therefor upsetting when the neurosurgeon bustled in, grinning, as jovial as St. Nick.  He ran a few more simple tests and explained she'd broken the dens or odontoid process -- that little "pivot pin" I mentioned earlier -- and that for breaks like hers, 99.99% of the time all it took to treat it was three to four months in a neck brace. No fun, but way better than neurosurgery, which is why he was smiling. (Neurosurgeons frequently labor against appalling odds; something that can be treated without huge risk to the patient is probably quite a relief.)

     After a few more hours of hospitaling (increasingly like the kind of rigamarole my friends who served in the military describe as "hurry up and wait"), Mom was in a better neck brace and had been moved from Neuro ICU to regular Neuro; they'd got her some better pain meds and she was finally relaxing a little.  I returned home about 2:30 this morning, having difficulty recognizing familiar intersections on the way.
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* Not their real names.  Dr. Wu, just starting residency, was the very image of "Rannie Wu" other than slightly shorter hair and an absolutely sunny disposition.  She's also the doctor I want stapling me up if ever I have to be: patient, careful and quick.