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I knew a tragic and fateful day was happening as soon as I opened the door to my mother’s house five years ago. I called out a greeting, no response. The house was abnormally quiet, despite the sound of running water about to overflow the kitchen sink. I turned off the water, checked the rooms, found nobody — except the door to the front bathroom was closed. I knocked, spoke, no response. I opened the unlocked door.
My mother was unconscious on the floor, wrapped in a blue comforter, wearing nothing but a top and bra. I tried to use my cell phone, couldn’t, it was either dead or too slow to respond. I grabbed my mother’s cordless phone, couldn’t get it to work either. It was like I was in some dead zone.
Some roofers were working next door. I hurried over and shouted to them that my mother had collapsed, could I please borrow one of their phones? One guy handed his down, and I went back to my mother’s side and finally was able to contact 911.
The dispatcher appeared to be following a protocol designed more for drug overdoses than senior health emergencies. “Is she breathing?” Yes.
“I need you to turn her on her side.”
“Why?”
“In case she vomits and stops breathing. I need you to turn her on her side.”
My mother weighed more than 200 pounds and was squeezed into a cramped corner of the bathroom. I tried to explain I couldn’t budge her, she might be injured, and I might injure her further, “She’s breathing, and this isn’t drug-related. If she stops breathing, I’ll be able to tell. Did you send an ambulance yet?”
I continued to argue with the dispatcher about the turn-her-on-her-side business, until the first responders arrived and put my mother, still wrapped in the blue comforter, in the ambulance, while she became semi-conscious and complained, “Leave me alone!”
My mother was taken to the nearest hospital, UCI Medical Center in Orange, where they stuck needles and tubes in her, and then she was transferred to her HMO’s Anaheim hospital. Three days later she was transferred to a memory-care facility — only after being heavily sedated.
“She’s being very hostile and combative,” reported one facility staffer, coordinating the transfer.
I think no one understood how close to death my mother was. She developed puffy ankles about a month later, was admitted to her HMO’s Irvine hospital, and died.
Her end of life was so needlessly complicated. At the hospital in Anaheim, a doctor asked me to estimate how long my mother had been unconscious. I said, “Just a few minutes,” but before I could explain about the running faucet, he started lecturing, her brain scan indicated she’d been out for some time. After I managed to tell him about the faucet, we came to an agreement that perhaps she’d been passed out for various lengths of time for quite some time.
What if I hadn’t walked in when I did? I didn’t have a key, so what if the front door had been locked? What if the sink had overflowed and flooded the house? What if those roofers hadn’t been next door so I could borrow a phone? I’d only persuaded my mother to sign a power of attorney a short time before, and that was how I got her into the memory care center — all because she was too stubborn to admit living alone was unsafe.
