Broken bones, loose teeth, and a couple of hippy grandchildren

Posted on September 2, 2002 in Encounters

We went from the heart of the oven to the heart of the oven yesterday, passing the entire drive to Pasadena in air conditioned comfort. Lynn’s 95 year old grandmother, Frances, was at Huntington Community Hospital following hip replacement surgery. We arrived in time to meet the doctor from the Episcopal Home.

Frances didn’t recognize us at first. Between the morphine and the cataracts in her eyes, we looked like her niece Ann and Ann’s son “Michael”. My height confused her. Michael wasn’t that tall, was he?

Once we’d straightened out who we were, she told the doctor about all her descendants. We were her “hippy grandchildren”, though not any more she quickly added. “They don’t have any children, thank God!” she laughed. I don’t know what she meant by that, but I let the possible insult pass. I followed the doctor out the door and asked a few questions about her future.

Frances looked like she was recuperating after a fall between the blades of a harvester. Large bruises dripped down her arms. Skin rippled from her emaciated limbs. She wore a pale green breathing tube stretched under her nose.

She showed the surgery scar to Lynn. “You can look, too,” she said. I declined. “You know me, Frances,” I remarked dryly, looking out the window at the sheer chocolate marbled face of the San Gabriels. “I don’t like to see people cut up. Especially people I like.”

She couldn’t figure out how to turn off the television. Her son Herbert hadn’t known how. Nor had anyone else. She might have been too doped up by the morphine or too shy to ask one of the hospital staff. I walked right up and pushed the power button. “How did you do that?” she asked.

She was happy with the service. People came every twenty minutes to see how she was doing. The orderly who brought her lunch spoon fed it to her even though she thought she was quite capable of dining on her own.

A nurse came in and started her on respiratory therapy. Frances sucked at the clear accordion tube for several minutes while I played backgammon on my PDA and Lynn sat there, looking worried. She’d forgotten to bring up a book.

The nurse retrieved the tube and promised to return in four hours for another session. “Send your mother my love,” came her first words. “And tell her not to break her hip! Tell your Aunt Faire, too! It hurts!”

Frances told Lynn the story of the time Uncle Herbert had had his two front teeth knocked out during wrestling. He’d been promoted two grades. The smallest of the older boys threw an elbow into his mouth. The coach saw the accident and told Herbert to get up. “You’re getting blood on our new floor.” Herbert walked home. When he got there, Francis called their regular dentist. He couldn’t see him for three weeks. She tried another dentist who said to send the boy in a taxi. He examined the teeth, which were hanging by the nerves, applied a lot of penicillen powder, and just rammed them back in place. Herbert, who is in his seventies, still has those teeth today.

We heard other stories. I found myself wishing that we’d brought a tape recorder. Frances’s father, the former Episcopal Bishop of Los Angeles, had died at the age of 102. I thought back on all the stories she told and realized that we’d have to work hard to recover what we could of her memory. We’d brought her dinner her home every week when we all lived up in the Bay Area. Now, that she lived in a home that provided her regular meals and because we lived farther away, we saw her once a month. The doctor told me that she would be in the health center for at least two months. I made the commitment to attempt to come every other week, at least. Maybe that is why she thanked God that we didn’t have children. We could visit her.