CHAPTER NINE

The next morning Elsie lay in her hospital bed feeling down and dejected; she knew where she was, a hospital, but was slightly confused about when and how she got there, and why. It was obvious to her that her leg was broken, but she couldn’t recall when or how it broke. She thought a broken leg wasn’t anything to get overly upset about which is why she was puzzled about still being there. She just lay as still as stone, barely moving at all, not taking in too much of her surroundings or paying any attention to the activity going on around her with the other patients and staff. She had a sense that something was missing but she wasn’t sure what it was. What she really needed was a magazine to read.

As Elsie lay in her hospital bed, Frank was walking around the house looking at the timber that needed redoing. Others thought it looked good, but he was picky about the state of it. As he was looking at the exposed beams in the sitting room, he noticed the bunch of magazines scattered around the couch where Elsie spent much of her time. He decided to take them to her at the hospital as she would surely be missing them by now. Not being able to go on her daily walks meant she would be getting bored, annoyed, and a bit snappy while lying in a bed. Spending all day staring at the ceiling wouldn’t be much fun for her. He would gather them all up, then go through them; he would decide which few he would take her. He wouldn’t take them all to her, just a few of them would be enough to keep her entertained and help her feel at ease. He was going to see her in the afternoon, but it was only mid-morning now, so there was no need to hurry. He sat at the dining room table thinking about her and what had happened. He replayed the events in his mind, and was feeling guilty about not having the door locked. While he had been doing his Internet search, she was out in the streets alone, he knew something would need to change. Letting her have her freedom to do as she pleased no longer felt like the right thing to do. Nor was it right for him to sit at his computer desk not paying any attention to where she was or what she was doing. He felt doing his Internet searches had distracted him from reality. The reality of actually caring for her, not just thinking he was. And even though he had learned a lot from the information he had found on various websites, he hadn’t acted on any of it.

All the while Frank had been sitting alone with his thoughts, things were turning sour for Elsie. She had been lying very still when a nurse came to her and said, “hello, Mrs. Herbert, I’m here to take your blood pressure, we’re just keeping track of how things are going with you in order to maintain your wellbeing. It won’t take long.” She then took Elsie’s arm and extended it in order to place the cuff on her. It was a digital pressure monitor so there wouldn’t be too much of an issue for her.

However, Elsie reacted aggressively. She yelled and threatened the nurse while ripping off the pressure cuff and trying to throw it away. But the nurse hadn’t gotten to the stage of securing the cuff, so still had her hand on it. Elsie’s attempts to rip it off and throw it away were all drama. The nurse had the monitor and cuff securely in her possession, so it was a big flurry amounting to nothing.

As the nurse was a fully trained, experienced professional, she reacted accordingly, not counteracting in a similar way or creating an issue, “I think you need to calm down for a moment, Mrs. Herbert, I’m not here to hurt you. I just need to take your blood pressure. Would you please allow me to take your blood pressure? I need your arm to do it, it’s for your own good, and it won’t hurt you.”

Elsie snapped back at her, “no! Get away from me, get out of here. Leave me alone.”

The nurse then simply turned and walked away, she would make a written note of this and talk to the doctor on duty about it. There was another ward in the east wing of the hospital for those with a similar disposition. The nurse would not take what Elsie had said or her aggression as a personal attack in any way, if anything, it was an indicator of what they had to deal with. They understood what was going on with Elsie so there would be no retribution at all, she may however find herself in the east wing. It would depend on her reactions to other nurses or doctors doing their duty.

What had happened was, Elsie was lying there with her eyes open but her mind was either somewhere else or temporarily shut down. So, when she clicked back into reality, there was a strange woman she had never seen before trying to tie something on her arm. So she was suddenly startled by the stranger who frightened her as she hadn’t been expecting it to happen. The Elsie of several years back wouldn’t ever have reacted that way, but the dementia had caused a loss of self-control and her inner sense of acceptable behavior was now also either lost or confused.

Frank arrived to see her in the early afternoon. Elise was pleased to see him so that helped him to relax a little. He handed her the magazines he had brought for her, she was very pleased to have them. He placed them on the bedside table and handed one to her; they were the ones they had recently bought. He spoke softly to her, “is there anything else you would like? I can bring you whatever you want.”

She smiled at him, then began looking through the magazine and simply said, “no, I don’t need anything else, these magazines are all I wanted. It gets boring here so these are good to have.” She then quickly became engrossed in it while Frank sat down next to her. He didn’t have much to say as he wasn’t sure about what he could talk about to her. She wasn’t saying anything to him; she looked a little distant and seemed like she was only interested in her magazine. But she was pleased he was there. After thirty minutes, Frank thought there was no point being at her bedside if he was just sitting quietly without any conversation between them. He stood up and leaned over and gave her a kiss on her cheek, “I’ll see you again tomorrow, El, enjoy your read.”

She smiled and said, “okay, thank you. It was good to see you.”

Frank left, thinking it would be a good to have her home again. He hoped she would be discharged soon.

When Frank arrived back home, he had a very strong coffee while thinking of his wife, and also of all the timber polishing that needed to be done. He sat alone at the table, thinking of the home they had lived in all their married lives. It had raised an issue in his mind about what was to happen to the house when both he and Elsie passed on. Having no children to leave it to meant he had better work out what they would do with it. Perhaps they could leave it to a charitable organization that could then either use it how they liked or sell it to gather funds. He was realizing that monetary assets meant nothing once people died; a multi-millionaire and a poverty-stricken transient were on an equal plane when lying in a morgue. So that meant money and possessions had no value to the owner once the owner of them was dead; others may benefit from the owner’s passing but when it all came down to it, wealth was irrelevant to a corpse. It showed him it’s who we are internally that matters most, not what we own externally. He was thinking of Ivan’s words from the pulpit and also what he had said here in their home. Frank was becoming caught between two worlds, the practical, logical world, and the spiritual, biblical world. He knew he had better start working out which was to be his primary way of thinking. Being seventy-eight and not getting any younger, he needed to make choices. Ivan’s words to him had never left him. So when people die, do they really just cease to exist and simply rot away, or does just the body rot away while the spirit continues living but somewhere else? He had better decide if heaven and hell were real. And if he decided they were real, which place did he want to go when his time was up? Maybe it was time to start looking at his faith again, if indeed he had any. For him and Elsie, going to church at Christmas and Easter was just what he thought people were meant to do, the odd other times they went were more as a morning out than seeking guidance from God. But he had heard the words and sung the songs. He felt it now time to follow the faith or forget about it; he had been through this in his mind a few times before. But he thought he needed to start getting more serious about it now. He realized the accident could have been worse, she could have died, or been permanently disabled. It had got him thinking more seriously about their future.

Later in the early evening, Elsie saw a doctor who seemed to be casually walking through the ward, although there was a definite line he was taking toward her.

As he casually got close to her, he approached and said, “hello, Mrs. Herbert, so how are you feeling now?” The casual stance was to give her time to see him, so she wouldn’t get startled when he appeared at her bedside; it had worked as she was calm and composed.

“I’m all right, doctor, how you are?” Elsie liked the look of this young man standing beside her, he was in his late thirties, an attractive young man to her.

“I’m well, thank you. We need to transfer you to another ward, a ward where you will feel more relaxed and where you will find it easier to get through the days. It won’t happen until tomorrow morning so you can rest easy tonight. So tomorrow, we will take you there.”

Elsie looked at the doctor blankly but didn’t respond. So he turned and walked away, but this time his walk was not at all casual. He now looked like a doctor doing his duty; he walked boldly with a set direction, obviously knowing where he was going and why. He had just mentioned it to her so she might not get too surprised when the shift happened, and the nurses would mention it again before it happened.

The following morning they brought her some breakfast, they called it food, but it didn’t taste like food to her, everything to her looked, smelled, and tasted sterile.

As she was eating, a nurse arrived and said with a professional attitude, “good morning, Mrs. Herbert, shortly we are moving you to another ward. But you don’t have to walk. We will take you there while you lie in your bed. An orderly will arrive soon and push you to your new ward. You won’t have to get up or do anything, just relax.”

Elsie just looked at her without any expression and said, “okay, just do what you do. I don’t care.”

The nurse gave her a smile and walked away to let Elsie eat her breakfast. A short time later, the orderly arrived, accompanied by a nurse, to verify it was Elsie Herbert who was to get transferred. They always made sure who was being moved to another ward, or for any other reason, was indeed the one who the orderly was sent to get. Depending on who was being moved and why, and what their state of health was, sometimes a nurse would accompany the patient still in bed. But for Elsie that wasn’t required, she had no coronary issues nor was her life in danger in any other way.