A week ago I responded to a fall, a little eighty-year-old lady with failing balance, tripped and fell on the bedroom carpet. She was laying on her right side and couldn’t get up, she said. Her right arm was at an odd angle, but when I repositioned her arm, she had full range of motion. When I pressed against her hips, I thought I saw a slight grimace. She had some screws in her right hip from an old hip fracture, she said, but denied any pain. She was able to move the leg. There was no shortening or rotation. One of my partners, an eighty-year-old woman herself, said our ambulance had transported the woman's husband to the hospital a few days before. The woman said her husband wasn’t doing well. She didn’t really want to go to the hospital, she said, could we put her back in to bed?
My partner convinced her to let us take her to the hospital and get checked out. With her husband sick, it was best to make certain she was okay, instead of leaving her alone.
In the ambulance, I asked her again about the pain and she said, matter-of-factly -- zero on the one to ten scale. While I wrote up my paperwork, she and my partner chatted about old days in the town where they both lived most of their lives, and knew all of the same people.
Today I saw my partner and she said she had followed up on the woman who was now in a local nursing home. She had gone and visited her and found out she had broken her leg in three places, but since her bones were so frail they would be unable to operate. They hadn’t even let her go to her husband’s funeral. She told my partner she had been in a great deal of pain and had known that she had broken her leg, but hadn’t told us. She told my partner she didn’t want me to see she was helpless.
There is a town in north Ontario,
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind
I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.
Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us
Helpless, helpless, helpless
Baby can you hear me now?
The chains are locked
and tied across the door,
Baby, sing with me somehow.
Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us
Helpless, helpless, helpless.
- Helpless
Neil Young
