I love my mom, who is 92.   She visited us for thanksgiving and had a stroke on the right side of her brain.  I’ve spent the last few days with her at the hospital, and I’m amazed at how resilient she is.

She was in the “rapid response” team of Washington Hospital Center, and they did a great job of keeping her alive.

This is after two days of ER treatment.  My mom is strong enough to survive even that!

They had her in a room with three other patients, and there was a guy next to her who was having trouble.  My mom was asleep, she had been woken every two hours by the nursing staff, taking her vital signs and asking penetrating questions like do you know what day it s? (Correct answer: No, and at three in the morning I don’t give a good goddam.)

So she’s finally asleep, I’m sitting beside her, and they lift the guy next door off his bed, which triggers the bed alarm (no one though to disconnect it first) and my mom wakes up, looks around, sees me and says, “This isn’t exactly the Ritz, is it?”

“No, I say.

She chin-points to the source of the alarm .  “And how about that wake-up call?”

Not much, I admit.  But I do think my mom’s amazing.

 

Published by Thomas Kaufman

Thomas Kaufman is the author of STEAL THE SHOW and DRINK THE TEA, which won the PWA/St Martin's Press Best First PI Novel Competition. He is also an Emmy award- winning motion picture director/cameraman. Since graduating from the University of Southern California with an MFA in Film Production, he has worked as a Director of Photography on documentary, commercial, and fiction films. In addition to working as director/cameraman for National Geographic and Discovery Channels, Mr Kaufman has also shot documentaries for British Broadcasting Corporation, WGBH, WNET, and Academy Award-winners Mark Jonathan Harris, Charles Guggenheim, and Barbara Koppel.

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