That poet who said “you can’t go home again” doesn’t know what he is talking about. On July 16, Ma returned to the house Dad and she bought in August 1968 after spending the previous seven weeks at a rehab facility. For close to two months, her life was regimented by health care professionals who told her when to wake up each morning, what to do in twice daily therapy sessions and barged into her room whenever they felt like it to give her medicine and check her condition.
After Ma had two weeks earlier seen the surgeon who repaired her broken hip, she felt frustrated when he told her that she still could not put sufficient full pressure on her left foot to warrant walking stairs.
He said that she needed another 10 days of boring repetition of what she had already mastered in order to give more time to the fused bones and pins to secure themselves.
Two days earlier on July 14, we did a dry run where we wheeled her to my car in the facility parking lot and she rehearsed getting out of the chair and into the front seat of the four door sedan. Just as the therapist had told her earlier in the day regarding her first effort to climb stairs, once again she did it “like a pro.”
That Friday she took the ride home and back to her house that she had not seen in weeks and readily climbed the stairs to the front door. She even walked up the stairs inside to the second floor to sleep in her own bed that first night.
This is what doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals hope to see and hear. They want their patients to be success stories. But it comes with a price. People live longer now and expect to live it as healthfully as possible even into their 90’s. Most people with few exceptions would go into the poorhouse to be able to pay back the cost of surgery and recovery. The Federal Government is at a crossroads because the cost that they are underwriting for seniors is out-pacing the ability to fund it.
However, there is no alternative. The Feds must continue to finance senior care or there will be a lot of seniors lying and dying on street curbs.