So, my 82 year-old mom slipped while trying to open the bathroom’s door and broke her femur head. There goes her mobility. Well, shit happens. Theres no point blaming the door or anyone. Dwelling on whether the fall could be avoided won’t unbreak the bone. So, we just have to suck it up and deal with it.

The thing about bones is that if they are broken, they will heal themselves. Like the skin when cut, bones also bleed when they break. The resulting blood clots would act like glue. About a week or two, stem cells from the surrounding tissue as well as bone marrow and blood would gather and form soft callus (soft bone) replacing the blood clot. A few weeks after that, the soft callus would become harder. Around 6 weeks after the break, regular bone would replace the hard callus. Then give it some months, the bone would be reshaped to its original shape. These are what I got from the web when googling broken bones while waiting for the doctor to look at my mom at the RIPAS emergency room. At that point, I felt a sense of relief that the bone would heal and my mom would be able to walk again. Little did I expect the hell that my mom, me and my siblings would go through beginning day 2 and the coming weeks.

Oh Gosh! Where do I even begin. For one thing, just because you’re at the hospital, where all the doctors and nurses are, don’t expect them to have your comfort and wellbeing at the top of their priority list. This is not ER, House or Grey’s Anatomy where the doctors are extremely passionate and the nurses dedicate their lives to helping others, they are just fiction, not real. Worse, RIPAS is a government hospital, it is not desperate for your positive yelp review, so don’t expect the doctors and nurses to baby you, entertain all your needs, to care whether you are well-rested or your sleep uninterrupted.