Broken Bones

 

I can tell by my daughter's voice something is off. We are talking on Facebook with no video. She says she's slipped on the floor at the T station in Boston. I am in Geneva, Switzerland. She's waiting for X-rays to see if her arm is broken.

Dar, my grandmother, never went anywhere, except one year she decided to visit her brother and sister-in-law in New Jersey. An hour after arrival she went outside their home to look at blimp, turned her ankle. She spent the rest of her holiday in a cast and being waited on hand and foot, something she said made it a wonderful vacation.

After my divorce, I lived with a woman who specialized in breaking bones, hers not someone else's. We were at the point after one of many accidents, I would simply ask "hospital?" She'd nod and we would spent the next few hours waiting for the cast to be put on whatever bone was broken.

I didn't break any bones until my sixties when I fainted. I broke my face and needed a plate inserted in my right cheek. I carry a photo in my wallet when I travel in case I set of the metal detectors.

They didn't cast my broken nose, but I was told I couldn't blow my nose for a month. On the day I could once again blow, we had a group blow. Friends from around the world claimed they reached for their tissues at the moment I once again could blow my nose.

A good-good friend slipped on the ice walking along Lac Léman.  With the wonderful Swiss system, a care worker arrived morning and night helping her with dressing and undressing while she was in a sling.

"It's broken below the shoulder and above the elbow," my daughter tells me. She will catch a taxi home. 

No home carer in the U.S. but her brother and sister-in-law swing into action to set up things to make it easier to cope. Her planned race in Sweden next month is off, but she will still visit her friend there. 

She orders the cat sitting service that she uses when she's traveling to come in and scoop the kitty litter every other day.

Flowers arrive from her office. 

My husband and I send a case of Irn Bru her favorite Scottish soda. At first she thinks the package is for Rick, not from us but was able to open it.

She is ordering in meals, including breakfast from Dempsey's, a favorite place. 

In a few months her break will be a memory, joining the others.