Originally Posted by Russ

On Wednesday a mate living near my mother messaged me to say he thinks she’d fallen outside her house as she appeared to be on the ground with a few people around her. He wasn’t able to stop but it was good of him to contact me.

After getting out of work I arrived an hour later and they’d brought her inside and she was enormous pain on her upper leg but curiously as long as she didn’t try to move it or bear weight on it, it didn’t hurt and was in fairly good spirits. As typical for her 82 year old self she didn’t want a fuss but fortunately a police car was passing and the officer stopped to see if he could do anything and his assessment was to get her to A&E. Driving her there would have been agony so we called an ambulance which turned up about 2 hours later. The operator acknowledged she’d be in pain but as it wasn’t life threatening and there wasn’t any swelling or heavy bruising it wasn’t a highest priority. Fair enough I guess.

She only had to wait about 40 minutes and they had her x-rayed etc.

Turns out she has unsurprisingly fractured her hip.

She’s being operated on this evening and is looking at least 2 weeks in hospital before they can consider discharging her and even then it’s most likely in to respite care for maybe a month or so.

Can’t say I’m disappointed in the Welsh NHS on this occasion but there you go.

Interestingly when she took the fall the first people to come to help were 2 15 year old lads who stayed with her and assisted with getting her inside. She had no idea who they were but the mate who was passing thought he knew their first names and with the power of Facebook i managed to track them down and made sure to thank their parents for bringing them up so well. There have been quite a few arson incidents in Port Talbot lately so teens have been given a bad name so I made sure to thank them publicly. My mother has even insisted I arrange to meet them and give them a reward. The parents have said no need for that but my mother is very stubborn on this.

Anyway my mother hates hospitals as well as the loss of her independence but this is one of those times she’ll just have to suck it up.