Bill Torgerson

On the night dad broke his hip, he was moved to a hospital room just after 11:00 pm about five hours after his fall. It was just he and I while mom went home with my wife Megan to get her things to spend the night. By the time we got to the hospital room, dad had been kept in the same position for a while, and I think all of the pain medications he had taken gave him some relief. Dad struck up a conversation with the male nurse who had been assigned to us, and it came up that the nurse was traveling to London the following week to go to a Taylor Swift concert. Dad really perked up at the mention of Swift. A few weeks earlier, he’d asked to watch the Reputation documentary, and he had described her as quite a sensation. After dad and the nurse talked about Swift, dad then tried to tell him how the Nazis were making a comeback all over the world. I could sense the nurse’s discomfort and felt my own discomfort growing as the nurse and I first heard the word Nazi from dad. Where is this old guy with dementia going with talk of the Nazis? The nurse and I were both relieved when it was clear from the way that dad told his story that he didn’t think it was a good thing the Nazis seemed to be growing in number. To be clear, dad never talked about the Nazis in any way other than an evil force that needed to be stopped. He was always on the lookout for current events and how they might tie to the Second Coming of Christ. He thought a Nazi comeback probably signaled the apocalypse.

Dad wrapped up his conversation with the nurse by giving an impromptu confession about a DUI he’d been guilty of at least twenty years prior. The arrest happened right outside of the small town of Winamac, Indiana–population 2,000–where he’d grown up as a kid, taught and coached for over a decade, and where my sister Anne and I had gone to high school. Dad had gone out for beers after golf, and he’d been pulled over just outside of town. He failed a field sobriety test and was arrested. He was humiliated and mortified that he could have hurt or killed someone, and I think he felt like he’d let down every student or player he’d ever worked with. Dad never had another drink the rest of his life.

The nurse handled dad’s DUI confession well. I imagine he heard all kinds of things from patients, especially patients who were on a lot of painkillers with dementia. After the nurse left, dad said to me, “I don’t know why I told him all of that.” Although dad didn’t bring death up specifically, I think he probably realized that he was really at death’s door this time, especially if he was going to have surgery on a broken hip at the age of 85 with advanced Parkinson’s. Although we’d never been Catholics, it made sense dad might want some sort of confession. When mom returned with Megan to spend the night with dad, I went home with plans to come back in the morning for dad’s surgery. We were told that wouldn’t happen any earlier than 9:00 am.

Note:

• This has been an excerpt from a longer piece about the passing of my father and the coming of Hurricane Helene through the area where I live outside of Boone, NC. I plan to continue to share excerpts from the longer work.
• Thanks for checking out this post!

On August 8, 2024 and forty-two days before dad would pass away, he fell and broke his hip. I was upstairs getting ready to take my teenage daughters Charlotte and Izzy to Boone for a basketball workout at Watauga High School. My wife Megan yelled to me upstairs that dad had fallen. Dad falling was something that happened somewhat frequently. He’d had some more serious falls where he’d scraped his arm on his walker or got a bruise on the side of his butt. However, most of the time he kind of slow-motion slumped to the floor rather than a sudden fall. He called what he experienced before slumping to the ground grayouts. I think what happened on those was that he stood up too quickly, his blood pressure dropped, and then he slid to the floor as he lost consciousness.  The closest I’ve come to such a feeling is riding a roller coaster in my fifties when the darkness starts to close in around an increasingly smaller point of light in the center of my vision.

Megan and I went into mom and dad’s room where dad lay in the middle of the floor. I looked him over and felt around his head. He didn’t have any bumps or scratches. I didn’t see any blood. I asked him what hurt. “That was a hard one,” he said. “My side hurts.” I thought he seemed okay, like all of the other times he fell. Megan and I got on each side of dad, helped him up, and put him in his chair. All the other times dad had fallen, he’d sit in his chair for awhile and then he was okay. A few times, he was sore for a couple of days. 

Dad was an incredibly reluctant pill taker and so when he said he wanted an Advil, we knew he must be hurting pretty good. I gave him the pill, and then my daughters and I headed to the high school. Mom and my wife Megan were home with dad in case he needed anything.

At this point in Dad’s life, we had started to work with a hospice service. Previously, I’d thought of hospice as a literal building where a person would go to be made as comfortable as possible in the days that lead up to their death. My wife’s dad had gone to hospice with lung cancer. We had visited him regularly. I thought people lived in hospice for a couple of weeks or months. When home hospice care was suggested by dad’s neurologist, I at first thought the end must be near for Dad. I came to understand that the word was a kind of medical care, the kind where the goal isn’t to get better in the way a physical therapist might set a goal for the patient to be able to walk to the end of the hall in a few weeks. Instead, the goal was to make the patient comfortable. Hospice staff had instructed us to call them before calling for an ambulance or taking dad to the ER. 

With me on my way to the high school with the girls, Dad was in enough pain that Megan called the hospice number we had been given. The nurse with whom Megan had talked thought it was possible that dad had broken his hip. Just as I was arriving to Watauga High School, I received a text from Megan at 5:14 pm: Nurse thinks pawpaw has a hip fracture. He’s in there screaming. Calling 911 now.

I wondered if I should head straight to the hospital to meet dad, or if I should rush home. The high school is just over seven miles of really curvy roads away from our house. It’s a drive that usually takes about twenty minutes. Megan said she was standing in our garage watching for the ambulance. The girls and I decided to go home. I learned on this day that given where my family and I live, we should always drive ourselves to the hospital if at all possible.

The ambulance arrived shortly after the girls and I did. The EMTs were two upbeat women who kept cracking jokes. The jokes and laughter felt wrong for the moment, but I also understand my conventions for how to behave in a situation aren’t everyone’s and that’s okay. For them, it was just another day at work while for my family, we suspected this fall could be THE FALL we’d worried about that would start a more direct path to the end of dad’s life. Maybe the EMTs didn’t think dad’s injury was that serious. 

The EMTs behavior reminded me of some students I’d worked with in a writing course at Appalachian State University. Somehow, I’d ended up with three EMTs in one class section. Sometimes we study what we call Discourses. Discourses are groups of people with common goals, shared specialized language, tools that need to be mastered in order to succeed in the Discourse, and stated and unstated guidelines for behavior. Discourses can be all kinds of groups of people including those with a certain major, the staff of a business, clubs, sports fans and so on. The EMTs I’d had in class had written about how sometimes there’s a sort of gallows humor that was needed to help them cope with the sort of issues they had to navigate at work. Okay, the EMTs were laughing and smiling more than I’d like while my dad suffered in his chair, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. We’re out here sharing the world with lots of people who aren’t like us. 

Three firemen also came to our house. They had been called in case help was needed when it came to moving dad from his recliner in his bedroom to the ambulance. The firemen were incredibly empathetic to our situation. Each of them told all of us how sorry they were to have to come over in this circumstance, and that they were sorry to have to cause dad so much more pain to get him where he could be helped. Dad mostly moaned with an occasional scream mixed in. It was the most pain I’d ever seen him in. I tend to go emotionally numb in these kinds of situations. My focus just goes unemotionally to whatever it is that has to be done. I usually get upset later after whatever intense situation has passed. In this case, I actually didn’t have to do anything. The EMTs and the firemen handled it. 

I rode with Dad in the back of the ambulance to the hospital while Megan followed us with Mom and our girls in her silver Toyota Highlander. Dad told me he just wanted to stop hurting. Nothing the EMTs had given him seemed to lessen his pain. When we got to Highway 105 that runs from Boone to Linville, the driver turned the wrong way onto the highway. For a second, Megan and I exchanged texts thinking maybe we were going to the Avery Hospital and not to Watauga in Boone. I asked the driver, and she said she needed to turn around. Every bump hurt dad. I didn’t realize our roads were so bumpy. 

At the hospital, the EMTs took dad inside and I went back to Megan’s car to get mom. Mom has one bad knee, a knee she would eventually have replaced. When a doctor would ask mom how long her leg had been hurting, I always got a kick out of her pat response. “Since high school,” she would say. I had to help mom get out of the car because she couldn’t bend her knee enough on her own. She would always grimace when I’d bend her leg the extra few inches needed. Mom and I walked slowly into the ER, and someone walked us back to dad’s room. He was in a hospital bed and a curtain separated us from the hallway. 

Every once in a while, dad had to be moved. I remember there was an x-ray and then later a CT scan. Both times I followed dad down the hall in his bed while mom stayed in dad’s room. For the CT scan, I waited outside a small room where several people tried to get the scan done. Dad sounded as if he were being tortured on the other side of the door. I felt sick listening to dad suffer, but it seemed like what had to be done. After the scan, dad was taken back to his ER room. I remember that we had to wait until a room could be made ready upstairs. I don’t remember that I’d been talking a lot, but I remembered Dad laying back in his bed. “Let’s try silence for a while,” he suggested. I squeezed his hand. Mom sat on the other side of the bed. She was already exhausted before this day had begun. Every once in awhile her head would jerk from momentarily falling asleep. 

As dad lay back in his bed with his eyes closed, I tried to anticipate the decisions we might have to make:

1. Should dad have surgery on his hip if it was recommended?
2. Where would dad go when he was discharged from the hospital? 

I texted my wife Megan and my sister Anne–who lives in Los Angeles–and shared those questions. Before this night of Thursday, August 8th, we had decided–with dad leading the conversation–that he wouldn’t do anymore surgeries. The ways in which dad retained some cognitive abilities but lost others was interesting. On the one hand, he could no longer follow the score of a game on television or find his way from the kitchen back to his room, but on the other hand he might tell us about new research on Parkinson’s or quote us a Keats poem verbatim.  

Going back a decade, dad had long ago told us he wanted to be Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) status. Especially the past five years or so, dad had told us his faith was strong, and he was ready to die whenever that time came. One day in the middle of working with a physical therapist to try and stand from his chair, he suddenly demanded, “What’s the point?” A couple years ago while I was away at a travel basketball tournament with my family, dad had what turned out to be a twisted intestine that had caused him excruciating pain and for which there had been an emergency surgery. I remembered mom (who isn’t a regular cusser but will throw something out if she does something like slicing her finger while cutting vegetables) using the phrase shit everywhere about dad’s hospital room the twisted intestine day. That time, we’d all noticed that after the surgery for the twisted intestine–likely due to the combination of Parkinson’s, dad’s age, and the general anesthesia–that dad had noticeably declined cognitively. From that standpoint, none of us thought dad should have more surgeries, but he was in an incredible amount of pain and so considering that, it seemed like yes to the surgery was the right call. Mom and I did already have the legal power established to make financial and medical decisions for dad. 

As for the other decision–where dad would go if he could be discharged from the hospital–we thought we knew that Medicare would cover dad for possibly up to 100 days after a hospital stay. Mom, who had turned 83 over the summer, had been dad’s primary caregiver up to this point. Dad slept very little at night; he wanted mom to help him go to the bathroom, and he often went four times or more a night. Many mornings, the first thing mom would do is announce to me how many times dad had got up the night before. Once mom was thoroughly exhausted from a long night, dad would often sleep most of the morning. We had explored whether or not we could afford to place dad in a facility. From what we could tell, costs would start around $5,000 a month and could easily be over twice that. There was a whole lot we didn’t know back then about navigating the system to get long-term care; I don’t think I even understood the phrase long term care. I repeatedly offered to sleep in Dad’s room to give mom a break, but she just kept telling me it was good to know that it was an option, but that she could keep up what she was doing for now. 

Sitting with dad in his ER examination room, I tried to figure out if maybe dad had mercifully fallen asleep. Recently, I’d started the habit of peering closely at dad to try and tell if he was still breathing, and I could see the slight rise and fall of dad’s chest. I took out my phone and tried to see what I could learn about people dad’s age–he was 85 at the time of this fall–and life expectancy after a broken hip. On the National Institute of Health (NIH) website (Aug 8, 2025 at 7:43 pm) I read, “Among patients on hospice at the time of the hip fracture, 8.8% died during the initial hospitalization and an additional two-thirds died within the first six months on hospice. The median survival from hospital admission was 25.9 days for those forgoing surgery compared to 117 days for those who had surgery.” Dad had not been doing well, but the information on the NIH website felt startling to me. There was an 8% chance that dad would pass in the hospital and that if he did have the surgery and met the average, he’d just barely outlive the 100 day Medicare coverage. I decided that it was okay not to think yet about what might happen after dad’s surgery. If he had the surgery and lived through that, then I could start trying to figure out where he might go. I didn’t share any of those statistics I had learned with mom. 

An orthopedic surgeon came to see mom, dad, and I that night in the ER room. It was so obvious to the surgeon that dad should have surgery that he didn’t really even pause to ask us. He just jumped ahead to how the surgery would work and what to expect after. I did ask a question just to think through if there were any scenarios where dad wouldn’t have the surgery. The surgeon repeated most of what I had just been reading online and said because of dad’s pain, he recommended the surgery. Mom decided she’d go home with Megan to get some of her things for the night. I waited with dad until he could be moved to a hospital room upstairs. Surgery would be the next morning.

This is the end of Part II. Thanks for taking the time to read some of our story.