Everybody's Got A Story Part 1

I met this lady once, we'll call her Connie, that came into the hospital with broken hip. Cute little lady, a little eccentric, but at 75 I suppose you have the right to be a little weird. Let me explain the usual path my fractured hip patients take: they come into the Emergency Room (ER - as if you didn't know) with a broken hip, the docs take a look at her and she gets admitted to my ward to prepare for surgery. They go have surgery in the Operating Room (OR - where Marites works), then they go to the Post Anaesthetic Care Unit (PACU - to "wake up"), then back to the ward (Orthopedics - where I work). They usually stay about a week or two, until they get walking again, then they go home. There are usually some factors that will slow this process down but that's the idea anyway. Ok, back to Connie. When she came up from the ER we had to take a history on her - just find out a little bit about her and her medical history. Well we found out her pension wasn't paying her very much so she was very malnourished and only eating once a day and once a month she would go to A&W as a treat to herself. She was living in a trailer because she couldn't afford anything else and her clothes were very very dirty. She had fallen and broken her hip on the way home from the grocery store so when she came to us she had a bunch of groceries. Nothing fancy, just some milk, bread, mayonnaise, canned beans, and soup. Apparently, this was all her food for the week. When we told her how long she was probably going to be in the hospital, she was very worried that her groceries would go bad and could we please put it in the fridge so it wouldn't spoil. She was in a lot of pain, but she never told us because she didn't want to be a bother. We ended up just giving her painkillers every 2 hours just to keep her comfortable. Well, she had her surgery and went through the usual post-operative confusion that many of the elderly suffer through but eventually cleared up and began walking on her own again. This took about 3 weeks (3 times longer than the expected recovery time from this type of surgery). She could go home again. The problem now was that her family, who had control of her "estate", had sold her home and weren't being very helpful. No one would take her in. Now she no longer had a home to go to. Our social worker, Janice, got involved and found her a home: a local care home. Connie was initially very upset about not having a home, but when Janice told her she could live at this care home, Connie became even more upset. She wanted to live on her own. She didn't want to be put in a nursing home, but without money or a home to go to, she didn't have much choice. After being with us for a month, Connie went to a care home willingly, but not happily.