Prayers for Shirley

The past year has been a really tough one for my mother. Her health and mobility deteriorated to the point that she spent late spring and summer in a hospital and nursing home in northern Illinois, while struggling to decide what to do and where to go next. My brother and I visited her several times each, worked with medical staff and social workers, and were met with numerous setbacks in making any progress in making long-term plans with her. Finally, after we all agreed she would move to Seattle so she live in an assisted living facility on Lake Washington and receive care from a doctor she already knew from a visit there a few years a go, she got weaker, had trouble keeping food down, and came down with shingles. Once she began to recover, my brother at long last got her on a plane and out to Seattle, where she has been staying at another rehab facility for the last month and trying to build her strength up. She never was able to get strong enough to meet the requirements for the place on the lake, but she finally agreed to go to a facility downtown that offers more help but where she could have her own apartment-like rooms and a community atmosphere. Last weekend she and my brother went out to buy furniture and decor, and yesterday she moved in.

I got up this morning to read this email from my brother:

After a great moving day, I left Mother feeling very good and actually able to move about her new studio mostly on her own.

Then around 930p this evening I got a call from the nurse at the Terrace that Mother had taken a fall and was being sent to the hospital. I went to the ER immediately and to make a long story short, she has broken her right femur and will have to have surgery tomorrow or potentially the day after.

I just got home and they are going to call me in the morning when the surgeon comes to the floor and I will run down there then. From talking to Mother, she was lying in her new bed, quite comfortable and happy, when she decided to get up on her own and go to the bathroom and then tripped on one of her slippers. She had taken off the emergency pendent they give everyone to call for help because it wasn't comfortable on her neck in bed.

Who knows what this means for the future. I'll give you a call in the morning when I get up

This is NOT good. It could mean she cannot stay where she has just moved or at least that she will be wheelchair-bound for sometime and may never recover the mobility she still had, which consisted of being able to walk some with a walker, though she had some difficulty getting up and down. As for trying to get to the bathroom on her own the first night, taking off her call pendant, well.... Anyway, prayers are needed for my brother and his family as well as my mother.