I Want to Go Home, Part 2

The roommate

During her first week in the rehab hospital, my mother gained a roommate. She was a petite, thin woman, probably in her 80's, who had to use some kind of oxygen machine which made a noise like a small, muffled generator all the time. Her only visitor was a daughter who had to drive almost two hours to get there, so I saw her there only once, when she helped her mother move in.  

I was usually the one there when the roommate’s daughter called because my father and I visited my mother in shifts. He took mornings and afternoons, when my mother was generally lucid, and I took the late afternoons till around midnight.

The evening after the roommate arrived, she tried to call her daughter but couldn’t work the phone. “Hello? Is there a nurse there?” she asked. I asked if I could help her, pulling the curtain aside. “I’m trying to call my daughter,” she said. She couldn’t quite reach the phone.

“Here,” I said. “If you tell me the number, I’ll dial it for you.” She did. I dialed, and when the daughter answered, I explained, “Hi, I’m the daughter of your mother’s roommate at R. She was having difficulty dialing. Here she is.” I handed the woman the phone and tried not to listen as I sat back by my mother.

Years later, my memory of what happened to that roommate is hazy, but I think it was the next evening. The nurse had moved the woman to a recliner so she could sit up. I remember hearing the nurse tell her it was important for her breathing to sit up for a while. The nurse left, and a little while later I heard a thump. I asked, “Are you alright?” The woman said, “Yes.” Then she moaned. I moved aside the curtain separating the two sides of the room and saw her on the ground.

“Are you okay?” I asked. 

“I slid off the chair,” she said. “I can’t get up by myself. I thought I could, but I can’t.”

I ran and told a nurse, who got an aide to help. They moved her back into the chair and used a kind of strap with a buckle to hold her up in the chair so she wouldn’t fall again. She kept moaning with pain after they left. “Are you okay, there?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “It hurts.”

I went back to the nurses’ station and asked if a nurse could check on the woman. A nurse came and put her back into bed, but all evening the woman moaned in pain. The nurse came back and gave her some Tylenol. It didn’t seem to help since she kept moaning. As far as I could tell, there was only one doctor for this place who did rounds a couple times a week during the day and was on call the rest of the week. I asked a nurse when she came by to give out medications if she should call the doctor for this. “She’ll be okay,” the nurse said. “We’ll get the doctor to look at her tomorrow.”  The woman kept moaning through the evening.

“Is she okay?” my mother kept asking. “I don’t know,” I kept answering. “I want to go home,” my mother said. I tried to distract her with the TV.

The roommate’s phone rang several times. I figured it was the daughter, so I finally asked the woman if I should answer it for her. “Yes,” she said. “Thank you. I can’t reach it.”  

“Hello?” I said.

“Who is this?” the woman asked.

“Your mother’s roommate’s daughter,” I said

“Where’s my mother? She isn’t answering the phone.”

I explained what happened. “I don’t know how badly she’s hurt.”

“Sh--!” The woman said. “How could that happen? Where were the nurses?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I had no idea what to say to her.

“I have to drive about two hours to get there,” the woman said. “I just got off work and have to change. I’m not going to get there till late. I don’t know what else to do.”

“Maybe you should call the nurse’s station and talk to one of them?” I suggested.

“Yes,” she said. “They need to take her to the hospital and get her checked out. If she’s badly hurt, why wouldn’t they do that? Why would they just put her back into bed? What if she hurt her back?”

I agreed.

“I can’t believe this,” the woman said and hung up. She must have called them because an hour later the paramedics showed up and took the roommate to the hospital.

“Why are they here?” my mother asked. “I don’t want them to take me away to the hospital again. I want to go home.” It took a while to calm her down.

The roommate never came back though her clothes and personal things were left there for several weeks.

I asked one of the nurses a few days later what had happened to her. “Why hasn’t she come back? Her stuff is all still here.”

He said, “I wasn’t here then, but from what I hear, she broke her hip when she fell off the chair. They made it worse when they put her in bed instead of calling the paramedics. That’s what happens when you don’t immobilize a fracture and get the patient the right care.” He looked annoyed. “I would have called them right away just to be safe, but…” He shrugged. Then he changed the subject, perhaps deciding he’d said too much. “Here’s your medication,” he said to my mother, “the oxy plus laxatives. How are you feeling?”  

Two years later a lawyer’s investigator called and asked my father and me if we knew anything about what happened to that woman. I told her what I’d witnessed. She told me that woman had died in the hospital from complications from a broken hip. Her estate was suing R. The investigator said she’d call back with more questions, but she never did. I guess they reached a settlement.

Many medical studies have proven that fractures, especially hip fractures, in the elderly often lead to death, especially within one year after the injury. According to a study published in The Journal of Clinical Medicine, “The absolute mortality rates” within a month of a bone fracture for people 80 or older, especially women, is “between 5–10%.” It’s a much higher death rate within a year after the fracture. According to the  Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, between 18% and 33%  of the elderly with “hip fractures will die within a year,” and there are even larger mortality rates among the elderly with hip fractures who “have dementia or who live in a nursing home.”

According to the Nursing Home Abuse Center, “Between 50% and 75% of nursing facility residents fall each year. This is twice the chance of falling for older adults living in a community setting.” It’s unclear how much of this is from neglect, abuse, negligence, or an effect of the frailty of the patients nursing homes serve.  It’s an issue that needs to be addressed, however. Would more nurses and aides per patient help? Stricter legal guidelines for nurse and aide training? Stricter nationwide protocols for what staff need to do when a patient falls? These patients could be our grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, and other loved ones; these statistics could be our own fate one day.