The Summer of Fall: Gravity is a bitch, but I'm still standing

Introduction

I BEGIN MAKING JOKES even before the paramedics arrive. In my defense, my mom seems okay, except for the not-being-able-to-walk part. She has missed a step at the bottom of the staircase in the rowhouse I use as a combination office/guest quarters, sprawling forward on the hardwood floor, then managing to pull herself up and use her cellphone to summon me from my house around the corner.

When I get there, she is sitting on a small bench near the front door. She hasn’t hit her head, or lost consciousness. She isn’t bleeding. But while she can stand with my assistance, she can’t walk as far as the door, much less get down the front steps and into my car. I call 911 and request an ambulance.

How old is the patient? the 911 operator asks. She’s ninety-one, I say. And what was the reason for the fall? Um, she’s ninety-one?

If this were a Hallmark movie, I type in the group chat while waiting for the ambulance, there would be a handsome paramedic who would fall in love with me, right?

Yes, I am not only making jokes minutes after my mother has an accident, I am doing it on my phone in a group DM on Twitter while she sits placidly a few feet from me.

Forgive me. It has been a difficult summer, in a difficult year, smack dab on the heels of two previous difficult years, which followed several difficult years, although I have only recently come to admit to myself how troubled 2017 to 2019 were. I keep doing what multiple therapists – well, two – have beseeched me to avoid. I create a narrative out of everything that happens to me. Professional liability.

The ambulance arrives, I keep texting: Alas, Hallmark movies have lied to me. The paramedics are not handsome.

Don’t tell the paramedics they’re not handsome, Laura, one friend cautions.

They’re very nice. And one was gratifyingly shocked when I told him my age.

The paramedics also are shocked when I say I plan to follow them as soon as I tell my twelve-year-old kid what is going on. Most people don’t come to the hospital, according to the paramedics. Are you saying, I ask, that people put their loved ones in the back of ambulances and leave it at that? More often than you might think, they assure me. They just wave and say, ‘See ya.’ Given that my mother has been a not exactly low-maintenance houseguest for the last two weeks, the idea is tantalizing. Unfathomable, yet tantalizing.

Throughout the inevitably long day that ensues, I keep insisting to myself and others that my mother and I are lucky. My mom is sent to the nearest hospital, the one I would have chosen if I could have gotten her in my car. We are lucky. Because my mother is transported by ambulance, she is prioritized over the walk-ins, who are enduring five-hour wait times. We are lucky. My mother is X-rayed within two hours of arriving, then given an MRI after the X-ray shows two small fractures in her pelvis. She is admitted by 3:00 p.m. to a lovely private room with stunning downtown views. We are lucky. Later, I will sheepishly tell a doctor friend who knows Baltimore’s hospitals well: I can’t help feeling that we got the White Lady Special. My friend laughs, suggesting I am onto something.

We are lucky. My mother ultimately is billed less than $500 for the services she receives that weekend. Without Medicare, she would have owed $7,000.

It is a Saturday in August. Three weeks earlier, my mother was living a vibrant, independent life in a small Delaware beach town where she and my father retired more than twenty years ago. Alone since my father’s death in 2014, she walked or rode her adult tricycle almost daily, drove (quite well, which is more than I can say for myself — more on that later), gardened, volunteered