Broken Bones, A Broken System: 40 Days of Saving Dad
Helicopter landings, shackled prisoners, chaos, cruelty, and the indifference behind the myth of compassionate care in the US hospital system
When my father called me and told me he had fallen, I didn’t panic. I live more than four hours away, so I asked him if he needed my brother to come and help him get up.
That’s when he told me to call an ambulance. And that’s when I knew that our lives were going to change forever and that my dad was going to a hospital and would probably never return to his home again.
During the call, my father was calm, telling me that he had fallen down the entire flight of stairs. He was concerned about how the EMTs would gain entry to the house—so he gave me the garage code. When they arrived, he told them he wanted to go to a specific hospital because his doctor practiced there. He was clear-headed in every way.
That was the last time for more than 40 days that I would hear my father so alert and lucid.
He did not make it to the hospital he requested. The EMTs gave him a fentanyl shot and brought him to a huge trauma center 45 minutes away, located adjacent to a New York state penitentiary, where a steady stream of helicopters dropped off victims of gunshot wounds and devastating car crashes.
I never got used to the whirring of helicopter blades that shook the walls of that ER, the crash of the doors opening for the gurneys, the yelling, bodily fluids splashed across the floor, prisoners handcuffed to their gurneys with armed guards watching over them.
When I first arrived, through the chaos, I saw the father who raised me, who suddenly didn’t know where he was and how he got there, so frail and confused, this former larger-than-life superhero of a man, now with stitches in his forehead and broken bones and fractures, the man who traveled to my city weekly for years to help me and his grandchildren though my divorce, the man who kept his beloved wife at home for ten years with dementia without sending her to a nursing home, our hero, this now-broken man.
I didn’t know how I was going to manage all of this without breaking.
But in most of these situations, there’s always one helper, one hero. This time it was an ER nurse who ran around all day and night triaging dying patients. This was a man who had found his calling, who loved his job and the adrenaline rushes that fueled him. He took time to explain to me that my father had broken his back and the base of his neck, fractured his hip, needed stitches across his bleeding head, and probably had a TBI, a traumatic brain injury.
Then he told me that people can live with broken backs and broken necks, and that fractured hips can be replaced, even in elderly people.
He gave me just enough hope to carry me through the next several days.
In my normal life, I can pay my bills, reason with people, ask questions, make connections, smile, and get a response. Here, none of that mattered. We had entered a new world where you can only wait and hope things work out. I have never felt so helpless.
Every few hours, I stepped out, unnerved by my father’s gray pallor, his raspy breathing, his confusion, to ask about next steps. A nurse finally told me that delays were a good sign. If surgery wasn’t being done immediately in this ER, it meant the patient wasn’t in imminent danger of dying.
We had been there for 48 hours without talking to a doctor. In an trauma center like this, you don’t get to choose your surgeon; in fact, you don’t know who will perform the surgery or when it will happen. I began to see that this is probably for the best because your surgery (and surgeon) will probably get bumped for something more urgent anyhow.
I learned the yin and yang of asking questions in a hospital like this: push too hard and risk being branded a problem, stay quiet and risk missing something vital or life-threatening.
We waited. A stream of men came by to wheel my father away for X-rays and tests and scans, including an MRI that traumatized my father’s already fragile state. The technician told me he didn’t have time to explain to my father that he was going into a big, loud, thumping, enclosed tube where he could not move. Instead, he just strapped my father down and threw him into the machine.
By the time my father emerged, he was delirious, shaking in fear and pain. His arm was bleeding. For hours he would mutter that he was “manhandled” and “beat up” and in “the worst pain” of his life.
I could do nothing. What was done was done; it would be my father’s word against the technician’s, and that wouldn’t work, not right now with my father’s confusion.
Besides, I had to get him safely to surgery before the shattered bone fragments in his hip migrated and killed him.
Along this journey, I observed the truth about healthcare in our nation. The comforting myth of hospitals being filled with saints is just that, a myth. The truth is that many of the people working in our hospitals and sub-acute facilities today aren’t just understaffed and overworked, but cruel and uncaring. I have never before witnessed behavior so anti-social, so shockingly devoid of basic humanity.
Two days into the fog of the ER, two men arrived without notice to wheel my father into OR, where we met the surgeon—a self-important man, more concerned with how he appeared to us than with my father or the operation ahead. Behind the desk, the operating room staff smirked at each other whenever he spoke.
I became uneasy, knowing I was about to leave my father’s life in this man’s hands.
Then we waited. Nearly an hour in that OR holding room—no seats, just a raw view of how the staff really behaved when they thought no one was watching. My father, mercifully out of it, lay on the gurney staring blankly at the ceiling’s florescent lights. He looked like the dying patients I had seen in hospice where my mother spent her last months.
Then all in a sudden, the doors to his holding room hell swung open, and a young man was wheeled in, laughing, which startled me. Laughter amongst this misery! That’s when I noticed the handcuffs securing him to the gurney—and the two armed prison guards flanking him. I hadn’t yet seen anyone with two armed guards, and I wondered what he had done to warrant this kind of security. He was just a kid—and he was funny, making fun of the guard who struggled to squeeze into a paper surgical gown. I smiled despite myself.
Bet the guard did not. “Just remember, once we’re in there,” he said, pointing at the operating rooms, “you’ll be unconscious, and I’ll have a scalpel handy.”
He did not appear to be kidding.
Then they whisked away the prisoner and the guards—and it was finally my father’s turn. At this last moment, someone realized my father was wearing dentures. When one of the staff was told to remove them, she made a horrified, disgusted face.
She was obese, with greasy, unwashed hair, dirty Crocs, and a food stain down the front of her scrubs. I had earlier heard her viciously making fun of a coworker with bipolar disorder.
I looked at her hard, and I did not look away until she had completed her job.
Then we waited.
When the surgeon didn’t call after four hours, my brother and I got worried—did our father die? Was the anesthesia too much?
And then, lo and behold, by a stroke of good luck, we ran into his surgeon, heading home for the day. He looked at us, puzzled, not recognizing us.
We reminded him who we were and why we were there, and he pulled out his cellphone to show us an x-ray of the “beautiful” artificial hip he had placed in my father’s body.
I didn’t bother to ask him why he took cellphone photos of his patients in the OR, or why forgot to tell the family as promised that the surgery was complete. I needed to focus now my father’s recovery.
And this is where things should have gotten better, but instead they got worse. Because what no one don’t tell you is that most hospitals are not good places to linger once your surgery is over, not in the United States in 2025, especially not when you are old.
I can’t really remember it all, that miserable, touch-and-go, those terrifying ten days in recovery up on the seventh floor.
What I do remember is the rhythm of those days: once one emergency is diverted, or a problem solved, another one rises in front of you: Fix the hemaglobin crash with a transfusion, then do a scope under sedation, then mitigate how the sedation hurts the patient’s cognition, then postpone physical therapy. Now you’re worried about pneumonia and blood clots. So, take patient off blood thinners and now you need another scope for blood in urine.
Throw in a patient in extreme confusion who keeps trying to get out of bed, and you have a perfect storm. Especially when everyone forgets to put on the bed alarm.
Every 12 hours, the staff turns over, and you need to tip-toe up to the new nurse and aides and start all over again. Mistakes are made, mostly incompetence, but some malevolence lurks in the air on this seventh floor—erupting when an aide throws a temper tantrum and flings her dirty gloves across the room, two nurses get into a screaming fight in the hallway, a doped-up patient explodes in anger after he’s told for hours that he will be released but then nothing happens.
This man—bare backside exposed through his hospital gown, IV pole rattling as he dragged it behind him—cursed the nurses and stormed the door.
I have to confess that this man was a hero to me. He was furious about the obvious: they had stripped him of his autonomy, his dignity. Unlike the rest of us—cowed into submission by the hospital’s power over our loved ones—he refused to accept it. I silently cheered for him. I wanted him to escape. I wanted us all to escape.
What comes to me in my dreams now is my father’s roommate, a former alcoholic there for his second liver transplant, the nurses who spoke about elderly patients in the third person as if they weren’t right there in front of them, aides who rolled their eyes when asked to change bedpans, elevator rides with armed prison guards wearing holstered guns, the smell of hospital-grade disinfectants, the constant beeping and lights and alarms, the way you had to start every conversation with a thank you in advance—or an apology for “bothering” someone to do their job or answer a question. I remember the bullies, the heartless people in scrubs—and I also remember a few kind souls. I remember the way that the days slipped into nights in that place where you could never crack open a window for a breath of fresh air. But mostly, I remember the trauma center taking away my voice, my rights to ask questions, to advocate for my father.
What’s most important, though, is that on his second night on the seventh floor, my father told me that his parents were coming to get him the following day. His parents, of course, had died decades earlier. I stepped out of his room, shook off the tears, took a few deep breaths, and then returned to tell him that no one was coming from heaven to get him anytime soon.
He would just have to stick around with us for a while longer here on Earth.
And I promised him that we were going to get him home.
Luckily, we had no idea it would take us 30 more days. We had no idea that no one at the trauma center really expected my father to recover. We had no idea that things were about to get worse at the sub-acute care place.
Thankfully. Because it was our blissful ignorance that would save our dad.
So sorry to hear all this Patty. I admire your patience and strength in holding it all together ❤️ And from all that, you deserve rest and so does your father. Very brave people indeed 💪🏽
I’ve witnessed your courage as you’ve stayed close to your dad, the hospital days and getting him home. I am always in awe at the resilience of our bodies and our hearts. Beautiful storytelling also ❤️