Oh My, Grandma

People. You’ve heard stories of my crazy grandma. You know, the one I lived with for 6 months? Well, today is another doozy, peeps.

Let me start from the beginning.

My mom has two sister, Aunt C and Aunt K. Aunt C lives in Delaware and Aunt K lives down the shore, about an hour away from my Grandma. My mom, as you know, lives about 25 minutes away from Gram, about halfway in between Gram and Aunt K. Get it?

So, the story start when Aunt C and my cousin Smartie were up for a visit. The come up a couple of times a summer to visit and go to the beach. On Sunday, Aunt C had just gotten in the car to head off to the beach with Smartie when Gram realized that Smartie had left a soda on the table.

Now, a normal person would say “oh, that stinks, he forgot his soda”. Not Gram! She panicked, and ran outside to try to catch C and Smartie before they left. Gram, being almost 80, fell, and hurt her ankle.

It should also be mentioned that Gram has a form of lupus and has to take steroids daily, and thus has very brittle bones.

Anyway, Aunt C didn’t see Gram fall, and Gram didn’t tell her she fell, so she went to the beach. A few hours later she returned to find Gram on the couch with her foot up and wrapped in an ace bandage.

Sigh.

Aunt C wanted to take Gram to the ER to get her ankle x-rayed, but Gram refused. Ultimately, there was nothing else Aunt C could do, and she had to get back to go to work on Monday, so she left and went home.

Fast forward to Monday afternoon. Gram calls my mom and tells her that she thinks she need to go to the hospital for an x-ray, because her foot still hurt. Apparently, my 80-year old grandmother, in her infinite wisdom, thought it would be a good idea to drive around on her foot (it was her right food that she hurt, you know, the one you drive with…) and just show up at doctors offices hoping they’d see her. Of course, they couldn’t. So now her foot was hurting her more, and it was 4 in the afternoon.

My mother, with a life of her own, couldn’t go. But she told Gram that she could take her the next day either before or after my mother’s hair appointment. What did my Gram say to this: “no, I have a hair appointment tomorrow, I can’t go”.

Sigh, 2.0.

So again on Tuesday, my grandmother drove on her foot to get to her hair appointment.

Then yesterday, she calls my mom again. My mom was having a mattress delivered yesterday, and had to wait for the delivery. My mom suggests Gram call her other daughter, Aunt K. Gram does, but here’s how the conversation goes:

Gram: Hi, whatcha doin? (she has a North Jersey dialect)
Aunt K: Cleaning.
Gram: Ok, nevermind.
Aunt K: Mommy, what’s up?
Gram: I think you need to take me to the ER.

At which point my Aunt had a small heart attack.

So once the story was straightened out, Aunt K agreed to come up and help Gram. She called my mom and suggested that Aunt K bring Gram to a medi-center in my hometown, a remote ER that is usually quieter but just as good as a hospital, and that after Aunt K could drop Gram off at my mom’s house so that Aunt K didn’t have to go all the way back up to Grams.

And that’s what they did. They were in and out of the medi-center in less than an hour, and were told, after x-rays, that gram had a sprain.

When they called my mom, the mattress still hadn’t arrived. Gram didn’t want to go to my mom’s house, and huffed and puffed, and ultimately poor Aunt K had to drive her back, then drive all the way home.

So about 2 hours later Gram calls my mom in a tizzy, because the medi-center called her back and said that after reviewing her x-rays again, it appeared she had a “power line fracture” and she needed to see an orthopedic doctor.

Gram, do you mean a “hair-line fracture?”

Sigh, 3.0.

So Gram called the ortho that she was trying to see on Monday, and makes an appointment for today but is freaking out because they need her x-rays. My mom calms her down and explains that she has to call the medi-center to have them released to my mom.

All that happened, and now today my mom is bringing my grandma to the ortho at 10:30. I can’t wait to hear what happens.

Oh, and she’s “really mad at herself”. Why? Because now she can’t vacuum.

So here’s the issues that I have with this story:

1. My Gram, God bless her, is kind of ditsy. Power Line Fracture? This is also the same woman, who, when she went to visit me at college said to my mom “I’m seeing a lot of New York license plates, but I haven’t seen any Long Island license plates…”
2. I’m seriously starting to question her ability to live on her own. She doesn’t want to accept her age. And while she’s in better condition than  a  lot of 80-year-olds, she has to recognize her limitations.
3. She also needs Xanax. Calm down. Smartie doesn’t need that soda. Your hair can wait. And people will help you.
4. Which leads me to my final problem: Gram doesn’t want to bother anyone. But, with being so stubborn about bothering people, she’s making the situation more difficult. If she had just either (a) let my aunt take her to the ER, or (b) called my mom Monday morning instead of driving on it, all this wouldn’t have happened. At some point, you have to learn to ask for help.

So that’s my G-ma saga. I’ll post an update on her status after I hear.

Sigh, 4.0.

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