Double Whammy

A little after 12 noon this past Thursday, while working with the chief financial officer and in-house computer network specialist at a client site, I got a phone call from my sister. She started off with, “I got bad news and worse news.”

Earlier that morning I got into the car to drive out to a Western suburb of Chicago that was at least a twenty mile destination requiring two tollway fares. All the way there I fretted about temporarily running out of stories to add to this blog. To my dismay, that didn’t last long.

“I’m listening.” I said in a hushed tone. She said,“ma fell down in the house and broke her hip. She is in the emergency room at St. Francis Hospital in Evanston.” That was the bad news. Now came the worse news. “Mrs. So-and-So (my sister’s mother-in-law) had suffered a massive stroke resulting in heavy hemorrhaging and was at death’s door. She was lying in wait, so to say, in ICU, also at St. Francis Hospital.”

My sister’s mother-in-law had come home from playing cards after 10pm Wednesday night. She lives in the condo down the block from mine, the one fancy enough to be able to afford a doorman. The uniformed fellow let her in and she proceeded in the hallway to the elevator but never made it to her apartment. She was found lying on the floor in an unconscious state.

On late Thursday afternoon I finished visiting with Ma on the fifth floor of the hospital listening to her mentally prepare to have surgery on the right hip where a surgeon would place a rod and bolts underneath the skin. This gave her a sort of symmetrical artificial reconstruction of her torso. Five years earlier, she broke both her left hip and shoulder.
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