Are Those the Panties Your Mother Left Out For You?

By now you’ve probably heard…I mean, if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook. My mother broke her kneecap Monday morning. She slipped on the icy sidewalk and broke it. The kneecap, not the sidewalk.

Perhaps now is a good time to remind you that I live in FLORIDA. Yes, my mother slipped on the ice IN FLORIDA, fell down, and broke her kneecap.

Here’s the part where I discover the fact that my mother is probably some rogue Black Ops agent who can chew up nails and spit out BB’s.

Mom’s cell phone battery was dead (bet that never happens again), so she couldn’t call me to come help her. So she crawled on a below-freezing sidewalk. With a broken kneecap. 40 FEET to the front door.

Then she reached up and rang the doorbell around 175 times. What can I say? I sleep hard.

The last thing I expected to see when I opened that front door at 8am Monday was my mother on the ground looking up at me.

It was like that Life Alert commercial: “Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” Except less funny.

Not that seniors falling down and not being able to get back up is funny, mind you. It’s the Life Alert commercial that’s so funny; or rather, the actresses they get to portray the fallingdownedness. Course, maybe that’s just me.

(And credit for that Life Alert reference goes to my niece, Lauren, who better not have this blog in her fucking browser.)

Got Mom to the Emergency Room and after a series of x-rays she was given the official, “You broke your patella.” Patella, by the way, reminds me of Nutella, which is very yummy…but I digress.

We go to the orthopedist in about 90 minutes. It’s going to require surgery, that we know for sure. Just not sure when yet. Within 2 weeks, most likely. We’ll know more in a while.

My mother is going to be 65 this year. Sorry, Mom. I believed you for many years that you were 36 – for decades in a row – but I suspected something was up when I turned 36 myself and realized you were either slightly exaggerating or had, in fact, discovered a way to bend the laws of time and space.

She’s a nurse in (ironically) home health-care. (I say ironically because her health insurance doesn’t cover home health-care.) She’s also fiercely independent. While she may be in a lot of pain physically, I’m sure she’d take twice the pain if she could only do everything by herself. But she can’t. And that, as they say, chaps her ass.

Mom hates feeling helpless. She hates being idle. She hates being a pain in the ass. Not that she IS, of course, but she FEELS like she is.

I had to break it down for her. “I know you hate the situation, Mom,” I said. “But you’re gonna have to suck it up and deal.” Then I shoved a handful of percoset into her mouth, knocked her over the head with a ball-peen hammer, and let her sleep for a while.

The prospect of mothering my own mother is a tad scary for me. “What you should be most scared of, Mom, is the notion that I’m in charge of feeding you for the foreseeable future.” Hell, that’d terrify the entire Al Qaeda network.

I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing. I’ve seen my mother’s panties twice now in the last 24 hours, and if that doesn’t make the Matrix Therapist’s mouth water, then the prospect of helping Mom bathe has GOT to make the MT’s nether regions all a-tingle. (Fortunately, Mom’s girly friends offered to help with the shower part. Whew.)

We’re slowly getting a system down. I think we can get Mom from her bed to her toilet in a matter of minutes instead of hours. If she needs me in the middle of the night, she has to call me on her cell (which is fully charged, believe you me) because her room and mine are on opposite sides of the house.

And she did call me this morning so she could go pee. At 6:15. In the MORNING.

I may have my moments, but I didn’t have the heart to say, “Mom, can’t you wait 45 minutes till my alarm goes off?”

Mostly because I knew I’d have to clean her up.