robert e. lewis

I was sorting through some old papers this morning and came across a sheet
from the hospital emergency room from about a year and a half ago, when I
had a bad fall helping a neighbor and broke several bones. To my surprise,
the ER doctor who attended me then was the new doctor my father just started
seeing! The name never rang a bell, not even a little tinkle.

Admittedly, I wasn't in top-form the one time I saw him with a broken
humerus, probable broken collarbone, broken foot, and torn-up knee, after
sitting three-plus hours in the ER with nothing but an ice-pack, but I had
utterly forgotten the name, the face.

--
Robert

evelyn ruut

Dear Robert,

Having been in a couple of accidents in my life I know the feeling. It is
hard to remember the actual faces of anyone when you are in that kind of
misery.

At any rate, it might be a real opportunity for you to thank that doctor
next time you see him. It is always possible he recognized you though you
didn't recognize him!

--
Evelyn

(To reply to me personally, remove sox)

mary_gordon

Doesn't surprise me at all. One of my sons (then 11 years of age) was
in an accident a year and a half ago (he fell off a roof) and I can
honestly say, if called to court, I couldn't describe to you or name a
single member of the emergency or surgical staff involved from the
time he arrived to the time he was released days later. I remember the
call, I remember the frantic run to the hospital, I remember the emerg
staff swarming like ants, I remember the waiting room during surgery,
I remember seeing him in recovery, but the faces or names of any of
the very fine doctors and nurses who helped him and were so kind and
supportive of our family??? Just didn't register in my brain at all.
Its like they were wallpaper - a backdrop to the emotional swirl we
were caught up in.

By the way, he was incredibly lucky and fine once he was all stitched
back together, but he used up 8.75 of his nine lives.

Mary G.

ksera

I know that feeling. After John had his heart attack & was in the ER,
had stents, the whole thing, I ran into his ER doctor in the
commissary about two months later. He started talking to me, asking
how John & I were---I had no idea who he was until he realized I was
clueless & told me! I was really amazed that with all his patients,
he would remember me!

Always,

Char

robert e. lewis

Oddly, I remember the ER nurse in the waiting room clearly, and the
admitting nurse - recognized both when I took a neighbor in a few months
ago. I can even remember the other patients waiting to be seen (possibly
because I was sizing them up and saying to myself - I'm hurt worse than *that* person!).

I Glad to hear that. I didn't quite make it to the roof (two story house) -
I was a couple of steps shy of the rooftop deck at a neighbor's house when a
step he insisted was safe dropped away. On the plus side, I did learn that
Isaac Newton was wrong about the laws of motion, and the animators of Warner
Bros. Looney Toons were right: the step dropped away under me, and I hung
motionless in mid-air while I surveyed the situation: grab the side of the
(now apparently rotted) stairs and possibly bring them down on top of me, or
just drop; would I be impaled on the steel fence-post, etc. I felt like
Wiley Coyote after he's run off a cliff, standing there until he can whip
out a sign that reads 'Help!', then poof down.

ObAlzheimers: The night of the accident was the last time I allowed my
father to drive at night. I had been inserting myself into any situation
where he was thinking about driving after dark before then, but I had little
choice at three in the morning, when we finished up at the hospital, and I
had an arm in a sling, a foot in a splint, and morphine in my bloodstream.
But the morphine wore off pretty quickly on the drive home, when he tried to
cross a divided highway to turn right onto the wrong side of the divider,
because he couldn't see well and didn't understand the intersection.

I heard him on the phone to an old friend this morning, saying he was
'nearing the stage where Bob will have to drive me everywhere.' He in fact
hasn't even suggested he would drive anywhere distant for probably four
months, and stopped getting touchy when I suggested I'd drive him a month or
two before that.

I know I'll take some flak for this, but he is still driving to his old
geezer's lunch twice a month: down to the corner, take a right and three
miles at 40 mph down a road with virtually no daytime traffic to a local
hamburger joint. But he has shown no indication of wandering, or of getting
lost in familiar cir***stances. He still remembers (usually) when it's the
Thursday for the lunch, and he is their unofficial secretary, calling to
remind the other members, and in my judgment, for now, he's still safe
enough for that drive. In fact, he seems to be substantially better on
those days - the syndrome of getting better for a doctor appointment seems
to hold for his lunch, too.

--
Robert