Like a dried-apple doll’s, Carmela’s 99-year-old wrinkled smile was sweet but a little spooky. She had come to the hospital from home, with two daughters in their 70s, her little old medical doctor of 30 years, Dr. Jones , most of her teeth and one badly broken hip. They’re not too impressed with high-functioning centegenarians in my hospital anymore; we get quite a few these days. But Carmela stood out. She was a little deaf and a slightly wacky but she had a twinkle about her. She was just so cute and vivacious that you couldn’t help liking her. And she loved to talk — only not in English. Her hearty Neapolitan dialect went up and down like the heaving deck of a ship, straining my year of college Italian. When she realized I could make her out, though, it sealed the deal — we would, of various necessities, be friends.
It took a few days, many medicines and quite a few units of packed red cells to get her blood counts up to the point where she could have the hip operation safely. This is a dicey business with the very old. The transfusions put them into heart failure
