My Mom's Exemplification Essay: Secondary Aging

My mother, Gabby, fell down the stairs last week. She was walking down the stairs after using the bathroom and near the bottom of the staircase, she tripped and fell. She fractured her hip, and now she needs to have hip replacement surgery. Unfortunately, we all basically know why this happened. My mom has been having mobility issues for some time now, to the point where she uses a walker most of the time to get around. This can mostly be accounted from bone density loss that occurs in older people. When we get older, our bone density starts to deteriorate, it is just a part of the primary aging in humans. This makes the bones in the body weaker, as well and the joints and muscles weaker (Erber p.84). I believe this was accelerated in my mother because she worked very hard from a young age, and also came home to work on the farm as well, essentially working twice a day, an example of secondary aging. Not everybody works that much through-out their lives. Next, the layout of our house is not exactly …show more content…
First, the stairs are very steep and not ideal for an old adult to be climbing up and down on, therefore we have brainstormed and have decided that we could put railing up both sides of the steps so that the stairs will be easier for her to use. We also talked about putting in a second bathroom on the ground level floor, maybe just an attachment onto my mom’s room so that in the future she will not have to worry about trying to climb the stairs. The problem with that would be that it would take longer to accomplish and be much more expensive. The final idea we had was to put a chair lift onto the staircase, which would also be more expensive. For after the surgery, we talked about getting an in-home caretaker for her during the day, but we do not know if our health insurance would qualify to let us do