As I said in another post, the story is not over.
On December 3rd, if memory serves, my father left home in the morning, saying only that he was going to go run some errands and then have lunch with someone. As it turns out, he had not had breakfast, opting instead for his customary pé de moleque, which he keeps in his satchel at almost all times.
As it turns out, some time late in the morning he was returning from his errands and headed to GDK’s house. To get there, he had to climb the stairs between Rua Pedro Americo and Rua Tavares Bastos.
The stairway steps are strangely over-sized, being too tall, of irregular width in tread, and to top it off, the steel pipe handrail is missing in sections. It appears as though on the way UP, my father either over stressed his femur, or somehow lost his footing and fell. His memory is not clear, and of course he was unaccompanied, so we won’t likely know the exact sequence of events. The results though we do know. His left femur broke off near the upper segment of the bone, and in the subsequent or continued fall, he got a pretty large gash on his leg.
When I first heard of the incident, via email December 3rd. 9:54AM (14:54PM Rio Time):
Bill has fallen down. He was at the foot of the stairs coming to my house for lunch when his leg gave way and he fell , badly , and hurt himself. He was carried here by three men and I took the ridiculous shoes off and his socks and washed the blood off and put ice on his knee…
At that time it was not obvious yet that the femur was shorn. All that was known was that he had to be kept immobile and expressed great pain any time there was any attempt at moving him.
More of my family, and a male nurse who’d been stationed with my father in his house, were summoned, and eventually – if I understood things property, the decision was made to call for an ambulance and have him taken to the hospital (that evening).
Bill was admitted to Hospital Souza Aguiar, and eventually found himself in a long-term ward waiting for the various disciplines of the hospital to collude in deciding what was to become of his leg.
Twenty one days later – on December 24th, the day after he received a prosthetic replacement for the part of the femur above the break, they released him from the hospital. Their instructions were to seek a physical therapist, and in two weeks go to an appointed health clinic (also state-run, like Souza Aguiar) to have the stitches from the surgery removed.
Dad returned home, and returned to the full time care of Jalves. My cousin picked up the prescriptions for antibiotics and pain medications that were passed on as part of his care – but it appears from later inspection that those were not followed through to their conclusion. The pain meds were less than half finished, and the antibiotics hardly touched.
Some time after the new year, as it became apparent to more family members that Dad was not doing very well, another of my cousins, who is herself a nurse, came to Rio to aid father’s recovery.
It was during her ten-day stay that the appointment to take the stitches out came due. That day, Tuesday, the 16th of January, was a long rough ride for all involved. My father, cousins, and a friend of the family who volunteered to help drive him to the clinic all left the house at about ten in the morning. At four in the afternoon, after hours of slogging through ques and recalcitrant doctors the crew landed back at the local public health station. There because of a complaint that my father was not urinating normally (he had not urinated at all in four days, and had begun to refuse to drink or eat anything) and due to his obvious physical discomfort and exhaustion, the station’s director made a few calls and got him committed to another hospital – CER, Leblon. The call was put in, and then dad and my two cousins waited for five hours for the ambulance (the driver from earlier had to attend to her daughter, and so had to leave), which albeit normally slow, was even more so that day because of a torrential downpour that flooded the neighborhood they were in.
Finally, at ten at night, hours after the public health station should have closed (but didn’t in order to allow my father to be picked up) the ambulance showed up and took dad and my two cousins to the hospital: CER, Leblon.
It was here that I found my father, in the Brazilian equivalent to an ICU, on the clammy afternoon of the 17th of January, 2013.
