True Crime and New Knees

RantMom just got a new knee. She traded in a seriously creaky natural one for a spiffy modern metallic model to match the other upgrade she got last year. With a few more months of therapy we fully expect her to be gadding about vigorously. We are all excited about much more comfortable mobility for RantMom. We also hope she does not need any more body part replacements. This is not just the medical experiences. It's all the true crime and horrendous weather that seems to come with.

Last year, Mom's surgery adventure started with (drum roll please) a three-hour hospital lockdown while police pursued an alleged bank robbery suspect reported to be somewhere in the vast complex. Lockdown means no one goes anywhere between parts of the hospital, like from outpatient admitting to surgery, while vague but ominous-sounding announcements occur every 10 minutes about the code and the location. Little Sister finally asked what the code meant--in time to realize we would thus need staff help to hand off some needed paperwork a friend had gone to fetch.

Next, RantMom had surgery just as storm systems were moving in at the beginning of the Snowpocalypse. There was some kind of minicyclone that blew through near the hospital one night and blew off a window screen. Mom's ride to her one-week followup appointment brought news of buses almost sliding off an overpass above the freeway and the ride home through serious snowfall made us bless our driver's childhood in MI.

RantMom and RantWoman got to hunker down during the storm: RantMom had plenty of warm dry hallways to practice walking a bag of frozen vegetables to ice her joints, and a new recliner to nap in. RantWoman made soup and did holiday baking while we watched politicians say stupid things about snow response on television and listened to snow driving novices spin out on what seemed to us like a ridiculously easy curve. Many things could have been MUCH worse.

This year, no lockdown. No minicyclone in the middle of the night. No Snowpocalypse. Life was in serious danger of being dull. RantMom again went to the rehab. RantWoman is SO humbly grateful for other people getting paid to help take care of RantMom. We're almost home free!

Until...

until...an all night cop murderer manhunt, in the 'hood, just spitting distance up the street from RantMom's rehab!

RantWoman lives close enough that, were she not blessed with the sleep of angels or of the exhausted, she certainly would have heard the choppers. RantMom's rehab was practically right on top of the scene. RantMom was undermedicated for pain. She sleeps fitfully anyway, and there were helicopters hovering all night! Poor RantMom was just fit to be tied the next day.

RantMom and RantWoman, neither one of us much laments the suspect's ultimate demise. Open season on cops is an outrage, and RantWoman's heart unquestionably goes out to surviving loved ones. RantWoman at least supposes we do need to excavate all the ways authorities screwed up in letting a killer out onto the streets.

More to the point, something RantWoman has not explored with RantMom: RantWoman would really like to hear stories of family members who have managed successfully to intervene when family members have been going off as badly as this week's cop killer was. RantWoman has a certain amount of empathy for the family members of people involved in creepy and dangerous things: the horrifying dangers, the total exasperation. The frustration of trying to press available levers to GET THE PERSON HELP. Maybe what people need is stories of what works BEFORE things get to ambushes, standoffs, manhunts.

Well, maybe....