When my dear grandma fell and broke her hip three years ago, my parents, who normally were only fifteen minutes away from her in Connecticut, were in North Carolina helping my paternal grandfather move from the hospital to a rehab facility. Needless to say, they had their hands full at the time. My grandmother’s caretaker had found her in the house and fortunately, she had not been on the ground for long. Grandma had been too embarrassed to use the emergency lifeline she wore around her neck because it was the middle of the day and “the neighbors might have seen the ambulances”. Amidst many a call from my mother, (who clearly just wanted to be nearer to her mother), it was decided that I would go down from Boston to see my grandmother. Her surgery was scheduled for 1:00 in the afternoon and my mother asked me to go down for 12:00 and re-confirm with the doctor what she had told him over the phone. Grandma should have a spinal and not a general anesthetic. (My mother has always had a wide knowledge of things medical for no substantial reason I can think of. She could have been a nurse in another life, so comfortable is she with the sights and subjects of blood and poop.)
“We just don’t know what it does to the brains of the elderly”, she said.
So my job was clear. As my family’s representative I was to make sure that our matriarch’s brain remained intact. At 96 years old, my grandmother’s sharpness had not faded. With her memory of an elephant, she was our family’s storyteller and story-holder, remembering details from 70 years ago when my mother has forgotten most of the details of last week, not to mention my childhood. When I arrived at the hospital, I was told that they had taken her into surgery two hours earlier than scheduled and I was told she was already in recovery. The nurse did not know whether she had received a spinal or general. Panic set in. The time capsule that was my grandmother’s mind, which we had expected to have for at least a bit longer, could have been completely scrambled because I had not arrived early enough to talk to the doctor pre-surgery. My grandma, who was always there to tell me “This too shall pass” when I had cried on her shoulder, could have become a vacant vessel in one afternoon.
They let me into the recovery room and the nurse watched as I took her hand while she slept. My grandmother had big hands, used to work but still with a softness underneath. The nurse told me I could talk to her and even wake her up if I liked. “Grandma?” Her eyes popped open. She looked at me. She looked at the nurse.
“This is my granddaughter Katrina,” she said proudly, “She came all the way down here from Boston. She has her Masters degree in music from the New England Conservatory… What’s she gonna do for a job, I don’t know…”
“She’s fine.” I said.
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