we're OK!

This morning turned out VERY different than expected! I was going to take the girls to school, come back home and take care of Max while my mom went to the doctor to get some blood work done. Upon her return I would do some more painting upstairs and then go and collect the girls from school, and do more painting in the afternoon. 

Here's what happened instead:

I took the girls to school and drove back home. As I pulled into our street I noticed a man carrying a sheet of glass and I recalled our contractor telling us that one of our windows upstairs that had accidentally gotten cracked during the construction, would be refitted today. I got ready to go up the steps to our front door when I heard the 'glass man' behind me asking 'Do you live here??'. I said yes, and he continued to hurry me up the steps saying that the lady upstairs had fallen and was in need of immediate help!  I immediately had visions of mom lying naked on the bathroom floor and blood everywhere (I have a dark mind...) and having to call an ambulance. Turns out she was lying fully clothed on her right side in the hallway, right outside the bathroom....no blood. When she heard the glass-man calling for her she had wanted to hurry to get the door and rushed out the bathroom, completely forgetting the step from our bathroom into the hall goes down about 8 inches. Imagine her running along like Wile E. Coyote does in the roadrunner cartoons when he doesn't realise he's running straight off the edge and into a cliff....

'I asked if anybody was home and then heard a thud so I hurried upstairs and found her here!' the frantic glass-man panted. I knelt down beside mom to see how bad her injuries were and she quickly reassured us all that she didn't think she was about to die on us, but her right knee and especially her left foot hurt quite badly. At that point Rob, our contractor, started coming up the stairs. The glass-man sighed a sigh of relief and informed Rob that it was a good thing he arrived because his mother-in-law had fallen and was in need of his assistance, leaving Rob quite puzzled for a minute. The glass-man's help had also come up the stairs and instantly went over to mom asking her lots of questions like 'Are you dizzy?', 'Are you hurt?' and 'Are you pregnant?'. Mom wasn't sure to be flattered to think that he thought she was young enough to be able to be pregnant, or to be insulted that he thought she was big enough to look pregnant. So there all 5 of us were, in our tiny hallway, huddled around mom who, by that time, thought it was all quite amusing. We decided to get her up and onto our bed since it was closest. When she was somewhat comfortable the glass-men decided that all would be well, handed Rob the sheet of glass and left. 

I quickly looked at mom's foot and saw it was quite blue and swollen on the outside. She was still in a lot of pain because of it and unable to find a comfortable position to put it in. She was also a bit concerned about her knee because we had just been to a clinic for her knees, where she was found to have Arthritis and was told to go as easy on her knees as possible. For these reasons we decided we had better get her checked out at the hospital. There was no way she could get down 2 flights of stairs on her own, and I didn't think it was a good idea for me to get her down... so I called Rob, who was busy installing the new window upstairs. He quickly came and was a great help getting her down the stairs while I got Max in the car. 

They had gotten down most of the steps with Rob walking beside mom, holding her weight as she kept her arm around his shoulders and mom hopping down step by step, holding on to the handrail with her free hand. The handrail stops before you get all the way down though, so she still had about 6 steps to go and didn't feel steady... so Rob just swept her right up and carried her down and into the car like a new bride is carried over the the threshold. One big difference between a bride and mom was that mom squealed rather loudly the whole way down because of the surprise of Rob picking her up, the fear of him maybe not being able to hold her, and the pain when he had to make a turn to get her into car and he bumped her painful foot against a bicycle really hard! I nearly died laughing, it was the funniest thing I had ever seen! Mind you, mom was laughing just as loudly so I wasn't being mean. 

So. We were in the car and off to the hospital. We felt special parking right in front of the entrance and getting a wheel chair to get her out of the car and inside. I left her in the wheel chair with Max on her lap just inside and went to properly park the car. I think mom should come with an invalid parking sticker because she tends to need one every time she comes over! The assistance we got in the hospital was surprisingly good. We were called in quickly and the doctor was kind and gentle with her painful spots. She couldn't quite determine whether anything was broken so mom got x-rays of her ankle, foot and knee. Nothing was broken, thank goodness. She REALLY didn't want to have to be in a cast for the remainder of her stay here... especially with our house being up 2 flights of stairs. She would have been completely stuck up here! They were a teeny bit uncertain about one little bone in her foot though, but the radiologist wouldn't be in until tomorrow so they would have him look at the photo tomorrow and have us called in case he saw anything that they had missed... but she was optimistic. She had sprained her ankle ligaments however, and so they bandaged her foot and dressed her knee. Then she received some pain killers and a sandwich (because my mom is a diabetic and hadn't eaten yet because of the bloodwork she had intended on getting done), and sent us home!

The most interesting part was yet to occur, when we got back home and had to get her up those stairs! She decided to do it all sitting down, and I sort of had to put her foot up on the next step each time she got a bit higher. We must have looked very funny. We got to the top of the first flight and tried to get her on her feet... failed horribly and she kept sliding on her behind over to the next flight. Same thing when she got up those and had to get to the bed. At the bed she found getting onto her knees to get up to the bed completely impossible, so she turned around. With her back against the side of the bed and  her derriere still on the floor I got on the bed behind her and put my arms under her shoulders. We braced ourselves, counted to three, and I pulled her up as she pushed off against the floor sending us flying onto the bed, mom right on top of me. I felt like I had just given birth to my mother and again could. not. stop. laughing! We had done it though! Whew.

So. I will do no painting today or tomorrow. Instead I will look after the kids and mom. and that's OK. When life gives you lemons....