The Lost Month

The Lost Month: Sounds like it could the be the title of a wild, drunken adventure like The Hangover, Part 17. But my lost month started on July 27 when my elderly little mother fell and broke her hip, and it is ending today as she is ready to go home to her apartment and be pretty much independent again.

The time in between is a story many families have experienced. You know, the one about how incredibly screwed up our country's healthcare system is. The one about how not only does an ill or injured person have to struggle through his or her illness or injury, but the insurance denials, the paperwork, the miscommunications between healthcare personnel and institutions, the lack of information, lack of kindness and lack of patience from people who control your destiny at one of your most vulnerable, frightening moments.

Of the multitude of medical people we've dealt with this past month, there were some who were compassionate. There were some who remembered that my mother is a human being and not a widget. But those people were just a few distant, dimly-lit beacons in a giant, foggy morass.

My mother is 93 years old, and prior to falling, she bowled once a week in a league, drove herself to the supermarket, the bank, and other activities. She is a quiet woman, not even 5-feet tall any more, whose brightly colored outfits always match from her shiny clip-on earrings at the top all the way down to her neatly laced floral sneakers. She fell while attending a luncheon awards ceremony for one of her grandchildren on the campus of the University of Miami. She didn't realize there was a step down.

The one lucky part of this was her falling literally across the street from the hospital that handles the orthopedic needs of every professional sports team in South Florida. (I kept alert every time I walked past the therapy room, but Dwyane Wade was nowhere to be seen.) She received a partial hip replacement from an excellent surgeon, whose demeanor indicated that this procedure was not particularly challenging or worrisome for him, though he didn't make much of an effort to calm or console us.

So began my mother's odyssey of being shuffled from hospital to nursing/rehab to hospital back to rehab, and then to my house. And today Mom is incredibly happy to be going back to her apartment. 

As our Lost Month runs its closing credits, unlike the makers of The Hangover series, we will all hope and do our very best to prevent a sequel. But here's an idea for a fantasy movie: How about someone fixes our healthcare system?