New hip

Grandpa wasn’t in his room when we arrived at the Aspen Rehabilitation Center. We found him in the physical therapy room, on a machine something like a stationary bike. He wore an over-sized  black winter coat, open, and his feet were strapped to the pedals and he was slowly moving his legs up and down. I walked around to where he could see me, and he looked up and after a moment said, “well, what’s this” and smiled.

Alix and I pulled up chairs and sat down next to him. The large, airy room was busy with other elderly people, who were outnumbered by the physical therapists and assistants. People were chatting, moving their limbs or pausing between exercises. One wall was hung with several pictures of lighthouses. Grandpa soon launched into the story of how he came to be there.

He’d been up on a ladder changing a lightbulb on the back patio at his house. He shook his head. “I’d been looking at that light for five or six days, thinking I needed to do something about it.” So he finally got out the ladder. He had successfully changed the bulb, but on the way down the metal ladder he missed the last step. “As I was going down I hit my head on that four by four… one of the patio supports … then I hit the ground and rolled out into the yard.” He laughed ruefully. “I was looking up at the sky thinking, how’d I get here?”

His hip was broken, but eventually he managed to roll over, then wriggle back to the patio and somehow pull himself up into a chair. But he could get no further. Any movement and the pain was excruciating. He sat in the chair for the next five hours, as late afternoon turned to evening turned to night. His girlfriend, Rosie, called over and over—they talk on the phone often—but he couldn’t get inside to the phone. When he didn’t answer at 10:30—a time they talk every night—Rosie called my aunt Rosemary. Rosemary drove over and found him in the chair out back and called an ambulance.

They replaced the hip because recovery is faster and less painful that way. But not painless. He'd been heavily medicated for much of the last two weeks, and out of his head. He had not been cooperative. He argued and fought, and for a time had to be restrained. Which made him angrier and more bitter yet.... But in the last couple days he had become more his usual self, plenty stubborn still but not so irrational.... 

After he had spent twenty minutes on the bicycle, his physical therapist, a cheerful but no-nonsense woman named Karin, helped him dismount to a walker. He got in a chair and she helped him do more leg exercises, with a stretchy band. Then they walked slowly to the parallel bars nearby. After a couple minutes of further work he sat down in a chair between the bars; his face was pale, and he rubbed his forehead with one hand. Before, he had said the pain was like someone was holding a flame to his hip…. While he sat recovering,  he began the story of the fall again, telling the therapist this time, and adding more details. Alix and I stood off to the side, trying to be unobtrusive and supportive both.

Eventually we all walked back to his room together. The therapist said to Grandpa, “bigger steps,” and he complied. The television in his large room was tuned to a station devoted to 50s and 60s tv westerns, but the therapist took charge and turned it off. Grandpa got in a chair and Alix sat on the edge of the bed and I took another chair. He talked and we listened. "If I'd only had another month before this happened," he said. He was worried about his lawn, which is the focal point of his summer life. I can't imagine, though, that he wouldn't have been inconvenienced if he'd had another month. The lawn was an issue, but more generally he had things to do each day, and to do in his own way; confinement to the hospital, and the rule of the facility did not suit him....

Eventually, though, he turned away from his problems and asked a couple questions. We told him about Naomi and the baby, and he asked about her doctor work. He said she always had been a hard worker.... From somewhere he recalled her "southern journey," referring to her trip to Mexico and Central America in 2001. He shook his head in admiration, struggled to come up with the right word, then said "brave-ity."

Then he recalled a time we met him at  the Minneapolis airport, during a layover, and ten-year-old Alix was jumping up to touch a series of signs. "She was a real.... what do you call it?  You know, people who are active, like in a circus?" I suggested acrobat, and he said, yes, that was the word. I had no memory of the airport visit or the jumping, but Alix remembered….

From the Rehab Center we drove to my aunt’s across town, where we visited for an hour before I had to take Alix to the airport. Alix said, “I don’t want to go.” She wanted to keep driving and camping, cooking meat over open fires each night, watching Twilight movies in the van before bed. I didn’t want her to go either, and I wondered, why am I going away from all those I love best?

We hugged outside the security gate, and I held it together, mostly, though I could've easily succumbed to a sobbing fit. I watched her proceed through the slow lane, easily picking our her red hair in the crowd. She'd told me she wanted me to just go, so I stood where she couldn't see me. But just before she was going out of sight, I moved into view and waved and she waved back.