There was no use in fighting her, but I sure hated it when her manic side got the better of her. On the other hand, she wasn’t wrong, really. She didn’t have a temperature. There was no visible sign of any real illness. And she was mighty determined. Besides, it did no good to argue with Katherine Jensen when she, pardon the expression, got a bee in her bonnet. I pulled the tape off; she pulled the needle out and put pressure on the puncture point.

“Get me a tissue,” she said.

I handed her one and she held it over the wound.

“Now see if you can salvage a piece of that tape to hold this in place.”

“Oh, Momma,” I said.

Lord, she was difficult. There was no please or thank you to be had. I gave her a piece of tape; she secured it.

“Now, I’m getting dressed,” she said. “Do you think I might have some privacy?”

“Of course,” I said. “I’ll be right outside if you need me.”

I stood in the hall outside her door and thought, Good Lord, her doctors are not going to like this. A moment later I heard a thud. I knew that thud. Momma was on the floor. Just to make the situation a little more interesting, when I tried to push her door open, her body was blocking it. I managed to push my head through.

“You okay?”

“Obviously not. My plan isn’t working out as I’d hoped.”

“I’ll get help,” I said.

“Damn it,” she said.

I hurried along to the nurse’s station thinking to myself that it would be so nice if my mother knew how to behave herself. She was always right. She always had to have the last word. But this time, there was clearly something wrong. All this falling business had to have a cause behind it. And normally, whatever our definition of normal was, she enjoyed the hospital. She got lots of attention and she didn’t have to lift a finger. Maybe she was afraid. Maybe the doctors had given her really bad news before I got there, and her first impulse had been to run.

“Excuse me,” I said. “My mother is Katherine Jensen, in room 311. Well, I’m afraid she’s had a fall . . .”

The nurse all but sprinted from her desk toward my mother’s room, grabbing two others along the way to help her. I got there just as the thinnest health care worker in the world was inching herself inside through the available space.

“Now, just what’s going on here?” one of them said.

They pressed the call button and asked for two orderlies to come help. Inside of a few minutes they had Momma back in bed.

“Does anything hurt, Mrs. Jensen?” the head nurse said.

“I’m fine and I’d like to go home, if that’s all right with everyone,” she said.