Getting old ain't for sissies

Patty here…

Bette Davis was right. Just ask my mother. She ended up in the hospital again last Monday. I say “again” because this is the fourth time she’s been hospitalized in the past twelve months. Ailments that send the young and healthy to bed for a day, send gray berets to the ER.

This time she was in the middle of a conversation when she passed out. It happened once before while I was visiting her in rehab after a previous hospital stay. I called a nurse who gave her oxygen, and she was fine. But it was scary.

I wasn’t with her when it happened again on Monday, but it frightened her caregiver enough to call 911. Instead of taking her to UCLA hospital where her saintly doctor heads the Geriatrics Department, and where she is fast becoming what the nurses there call a “frequent flyer,” paramedics took her to an upscale boutique hospital where the $18.00 valet parking fees and the pre-nups of its A-list neighbors are not negotiable.

When I came to visit her on Tuesday, at least forty-seven uniformed valets lined up to take my car. When I left, only one guy was retrieving them, some yoyo who seemed to think he was competing in the Indy 500. I can still smell the burning rubber from my tires.



The hospital had security, too, a burly guy in uniform who stopped me at the elevator.

“You gotta sign in,” he barked. “What’s your name?”

“Patty.”

That was apparently good enough for him. He wrote ‘Patty’ on a sticky nametag and handed it to me. So much for security. I could have been at a Chamber of Commerce mixer.

I found my mother in a chichi private room with a spectacular view. A nutritionist was there, taking her lunch order. My mother passed on the grilled tofu and opted for yogurt and fresh fruit. She waited for the nutritionist to leave before unleashing her frustration.

“Five firemen brought me here.” Her tone was laced with incredulity. “Five!”

“Were they hot?”



She rolled her eyes to let me know she wouldn't be answering that question.

“This place doesn't have any of the TV channels I like to watch," she went on. "And I ring the call button again and again, but nobody comes.”

After listening to her complain for a while, I detected the mother of all problems. She had no telephone in her room. This was very bad news, because she knew I had a cold and she was worried. At home she would have called to check on me. Here she was dependent on the kindness of strangers, some of whom were hardly the Florence Nightingale archetype. Still, she tried. She made her nurse promise to call me. When the nurse reneged on the deal, my mother began to wonder if she was in a hospital at all. Maybe the CIA was holding her in an undisclosed country that ended in “istan.”

She was cranky, so I knew she was going to live.

When I picked her up at the hospital on Thursday, the nurse who checked her out had never read my mother’s chart. She couldn’t tell me what medications she’d taken that day or what tests she’d had while in custody. She told me I’d have to call the doctor. Later I called the doctor listed on the release form. I was told that he didn’t have my mother’s records. I’d have to call the hospital. I called the hospital. (Wasn’t I just there?) I got a machine. I left my number. No one called back. The whole experience made me want to scream.



In the car on the way home, my mother said, “I never want to go back to that place again. They don’t know me there.” Her words were the ultimate indictment.

Navigating the healthcare bureaucracy in this country is daunting. I know because I’ve been doing it for her for the past four years, ever since my father died. I understand how she feels. If you have to be hooked up to machines, it’s better to be in a place where you’re a “frequent flyer,” a place where everybody knows your name.

Cheers!