Nov
21

Down With Cars.

It is never good news when your phone rings at 4 am. It rang for a while, and then it rang again, and finally, when it began ringing for the third time, I answered and there was my mom’s boss, telling me she had been hit by a car. My mother, as you will recall, is living in Switzerland, and apparently she was crossing the street when a car hit her, and aren’t the Swiss supposed to be cautious? That is what I want to know. My mother was still in surgery when I got the news, for a few nastily fractured bones in her ankle, and she also broke a bone in her opposite knee. She is allegedly fine otherwise, and there is no internal bleeding (though I would feel better if I had seen the CT scans—not that I know how to read a CT scan, but it seems like on medical shows people are always “fine” after blunt force trauma and then suddenly they aren’t anymore and everyone is yelling CODE BLUE! and whipping out the scalpels). I haven’t talked to her yet, but we have exchanged email. Apparently she dislikes the bedpans and her nurses all speak German, which wouldn’t be a problem except that my mother does not, strictly speaking, speak German. I have been Googling and emailing her helpful phrases, like “Mehr Morphium, bitte,” and she has a few friends there who are more familiar with the language. As is probably obvious from the fact that this entry is one long rambling paragraph, I am a little freaked out. Switzerland is so far away, and I hate to think of my mother all alone in a hospital bed over Thanksgiving being tended to by Helga the German nurse, whom I picture wearing support hose and a grimace. My mother is very small, only five feet tall, and weighs just over 100 pounds, and a whole car hit her. I am trying to take comfort in the fact that European cars are often diminutive, but I am shaken, and I know she must be lonely and afraid. I don’t think parents should be allowed to move overseas. Or children, for that matter. Everyone should just stay home where they belong.
The rest of my relations are taking things calmly and making jokes about how it was careless of the driver to hit a lawyer and then leave her alive like that, so that she can sue. It is easy to be funny when it is not your mother, I suppose. Though there have been many gallant offers of immediate overseas travel to care for her, as she obviously won’t be walking for a while. On account of both legs being broken. My poor mother! I think she should come home this instant. Being hurt is bad enough without being in a foreign hospital in a foreign country, surrounded by foreigners. She should be with her family, sitting in one of those wicker invalid chairs with a lap rug and a nice hot toddy. I’ll tell you one thing, if the babies think they are ever going gallivanting around Europe crossing streets they are sorely mistaken.

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |