The Facial of Doom

One moment I was backstroking across a jungle pool and trying to decide if I was a mermaid, a water nymph or Esther Williams.

The next moment, I saw my frail, bright-eyed 94-year-old mother lying in a pool of blood on the tile floor of a beauty salon.

We had planned this vacation so carefully. Mom wanted to come up to Vermont, but it was a long trip from Florida and we decided that my house, with its narrow stairs and claw-foot bathtub, wasn’t safe. But she was going stir crazy in her independent living apartment, comfortable and safe but housebound and bored.

And after fighting off a urinary tract infection, a bleed in her right eye, and a congested lung, she was finally healthy — fragile, but healthy.

I suggested flying down to Florida and taking her on a mini-vacation. We found a package deal at a lovely Ft. Lauderdale hotel called The Riverside and booked the handicapped-accessible room for three nights. That way Mom, who is often reliant on a walker, would be near the elevator.

Yes, we thought it out to that degree of detail.

I Googled restaurants and printed out menus. I found interesting things to do. I got a good deal on a rental car. And on Sunday, Sept. 25, I flew in to help her pack.

One last doctor on Monday and we were cleared for takeoff.

Tuesday morning we loaded the car and drove down to Ft. Lauderdale’s luxury tourist center, Las Olas Boulevard— the poorer Rodeo Drive. We checked into the hotel and loved the room — high up and spacious with a view of buildings towering over a glittery river. We had a huge bathroom with gold fixtures. Mom couldn’t wait to try the bed.

We had lunch at an outside cafe and watched the people and the fancy cars. Mom was enchanted. We were congratulating ourselves on our fabulous vacation idea and looking forward to spa days, water taxis, watching sleek, dark-eyed yachts shaped like sharks docking on the riverfront. And wonderful, wonderful meals — French food and lobsters — loads of lobsters.

We sat by the hotel pool and watched boats go by on the river, the Jungle Queen, the water taxi, the yachts. We were in heaven.

Then I took Mom to a salon across from the hotel for her facial. While we waited, we listened to techno music and admired the handsome, style-slap-happy men and women working there, It was as far a cry from Mom’s senior residence as it was from my Vermont woods.

I left Mom in the care of a skinny blond French aesthetician who was wearing tight white pants and a tighter t-shirt. I explained to her that Mom was 94 and fragile, and warned her to keep an eye on her — especially when she was getting off the table.

Then I went back to the room, changed into a bathing suit and went for a swim.

An hour later, when I went to pick up Mom, the aesthetician said she was resting on the table. So I waited outside with a good book by Reginald Hill. Then the door flung open and a stocky woman ran out, frantically waving her arms at one of the men, a co-owner, who cane running inside.

“Uh oh,” I said. “This is going to affect me.”

I went back into the salon and a tough tall stick of a blonde said, accusingly, “Your mother fell.”

I pushed through the stylists and looked into the room. My poor mother was lying on her side on the tile floor. Someone had put a pillow between her legs and propped her head on another which was stained red with her blood. Blood pooled on the floor around her, Her eyes were closed, her face was red and blotched and twisted with pain, her hair was sticking straight up and she looked like a plucked and skinned chicken. I was terrified.

I knelt by her head and tentatively held her shoulder. “Mom, can you hear me”

She moaned.

Someone said an ambulance was on its way.

One of the owners was talking to Mom. “Rose, can you hear me? Rose, can you speak”

Rose, (I thought) are you conscious? Rose, are you concussed? Rose, do you have a lawyer?

I was in shock. I was terrified. It was a facial, for god’s sake! A spa vacation with a facial!  How could my mother be lying in a pool of blood on the floor of some upscale beauty salon in Ft. Lauderdale? We’d been on vacation for about five hours.

I remember the aesthetician saying plaintively in her sweet French accent, “But I was holding her.” Not too well, Blondie. Not too well.

Then the EMTs were there, two good-looking and sympathetic young men, and I found that I could be useful. Name, birth date, health insurance. I could handle the factual stuff better than the emotional.

Next thing I remember, my naked mother, wrapped in a sheet, was in the back of an ambulance and I was in the front with a bag of her clothes and her gold jewelry stuffed into the pocket of my jeans.

I was still wearing my bathing suit under my clothing, and I was still soaking wet when we reached the air-conditioned ER.

We started to see the outlines of the damage. Two black eyes. Split lip. Broken nose. Deep gashes in her legs. Whiplash in her neck. Her calf muscles were twisting into excruciating cramps. She screamed again and again as they tried to put a line in her arm. It chilled me more than the air conditioning to hear my mother’s thin high whimpering scream.

“Her veins are so fragile that every time I put a needle in one it bursts,” said the young doctor.

In the end, they called someone more skilled to get the line in.

Mom was whimpering and crying now, “It hurts. It hurts. I’m in so much pain.”

The sympathetic nurse pushed some morphine into the line and wheeled her off to imaging. The news was not good. There was bleeding in what sounded like “the arachnoid something” of her brain.

“Arachnid? Like spiders?” I asked.

The nurse explained that it was a serious part of the brain and neither good news nor amusing. The neurosurgeon would be in to talk to me, Decisions would have to be made.

I leaned over the bed,

“Mom, we have to talk,” I said. “We’ve talked about pulling the plug and all that, but this isn’t cancer. Should I give the doctors permission to operate on your brain?”

Brain surgery for a facial?

“I’m 94,” my mother said. “My mother died at 94. I’m ready to go. Don’t let them turn me into a vegetable.”

By this time Mom had turned not into a vegetable, but into a rushing river of urine. Her bladder had quit. She tried to boost up her butt while I tried to slide a bedpan under her. But it was hard because she was weak under ordinary circumstances and in a lot of pain as well. She impatiently blamed me for not being able to efficiently slide the plastic bedpan underneath her.

“I’m a writer,” I yelled. “This is beyond my level of expertise.”

We were successful with the bed pan three times. Then she gave up and just let it flow.

“Where is all this urine coming from,” she wondered.

I ran for the nurse who put in a catheter and took care of that particular problem.

A lovely young doctor with a light touch and a bright smile put stitches into my mother’s lip. She also increased the morphine.

The EMT guys came back to check on Mom. I told them about the brain bleed and they shook their heads.

“Can you have death by facial?” I said, and since humor is my one defense against tragedy, thank god they laughed.

Around midnight Mom was moved into the cardiovascular ICU. I was still damp and trembling. The nurse, Jasmine, kindly took me downstairs and asked the security guard to call me a cab.

“Don’t tell the driver you’re not from around here,” the guard said. “He’ll drive you to Las Olas Boulevard by way of Miami Beach,”

The hotel turned out to be less than two miles from the hospital.

On the bed next to mine were my mothers slippers and the sparkly blouse and slinky pants she had chosen for our first big dinner. Her toothbrush was on the sink in the bathroom next to mine.

I fell into bed sobbing, full of emotions that were tearing me apart: anger, fear, helplessness, terror, sadness.

Our vacation had lasted exactly four and a half hours.

(To be continued.)