Seems there’s no escaping your genetic destiny. My grandmother became very food-focused after her stroke and so, too, has my mother.
This explains why – though she knows she should never do so – my mum attempted to walk unaided and unsupervised across her room to reach a biscuit tin, and how she happened to come crashing down.
The fall happened just after 11am.
Of course, it was a weekend when people are crashing about doing all sorts of things, which is why it took two hours to get an ambulance to drive her the 300 metres from the nursing home to the hospital next door.
The on-call doctor arrived at 4pm. He very gently assessed that she’d broken her arm in at least two places but couldn’t confirm this because the hospital radiology department is unattended at weekends.
She needed to be moved to a larger hospital. An ambulance was called at 5pm.
One arrived to deposit another patient at 7pm and, just as the paramedics were about to reload their gurney with Mum, they got a code 1 call.
At 10.30pm, Mum was finally loaded into an ambulance and at 12.45am she was X-rayed. That allowed staff to remove her torturous neck brace, but it confirmed a small bleed on the brain, which required advice from a neurosurgeon. Just after midday, Mum was moved from the accident and emergency department into the surgical ward.
Now, more than 24 hours since the fall, she still couldn’t eat or drink anything until an orthopaedic surgeon assessed her.
At 6.45pm he arrived. She will not be having surgery today. Fifteen minutes later, Mum finally has a cup of tea, but something’s missing … something from 36 hours earlier.
Can I have a biscuit, please?
