While walking down the hall from a Radiology appointment last week, my mother-in-law, Shirley, aka Mamaw, fell and broke her hip. Two days later, she was having hip surgery. A few days after that, she was moved to Morningview Village for a couple of weeks of rehab and a diet of beef chunks marinated in gravy.

This afternoon, my assigned task was to take my 89-year-old father-in-law, Raymond, aka Papa, to visit his wife. Simple enough. This would allow my wife, Janet, aka Lil Jan, to get a much-needed break from her duties of caregiving and holding nurses accountable.

We arrived at Morningview, signed in, and said hello to the colorful birds in an enclosure in the lobby. I then led Papa down the hallway, to the left, and into his wife’s room—#214. Unfortunately, she wasn’t there.

“She must be at Physical Therapy,” Papa said.

“No, they took her for dialysis. She’ll be gone for 4 hours.”

I glanced behind the curtain and said hello to Mamaw’s new roommate, Ethel. Or maybe it was Martha. Nice lady.

“Hi, I’m Steve, her son-in-law, and this is her husband, Raymond.”

“Nice to meet you all.”

Papa sat down in the guest chair, and I created another sitting spot by removing some of Mamaw’s belongings from the wheelchair and placing them above the TV.

Papa leaned over and whispered to me, “Dialysis?”

“Never mind her,” I whispered back. “She isn’t all there. I’m no doctor, but you don’t do dialysis for a broken hip.”

We retrieved our reading material and settled in for what we thought would be 15 minutes until Mamaw returned.

After 45 minutes, a concerned Papa said, “It sure is taking a long time. I hope she’s okay.”

I got up and decided to look for her. I asked a nurse, who told me she could be doing PT in the gym on this floor or perhaps in the gym downstairs. After not finding her upstairs, I took the elevator downstairs and looked in the gym there. Nothing. Puzzled, I glanced up and noticed her in a wheelchair entering room #114… her room… a room approximately 14 feet directly below Papa’s location.

I retrieved Papa Raymond from upstairs and got him settled in the correct room next to his wife. Holding her hand, he then asked her the question that had been on both our minds.

“How was dialysis?”