Brotherly Love

I was able to bond with my "baby" brother today. He's 30 years old, has been taller than me since he was 13 or so, and can easily pull me off a sofa with one hand, but he's still my baby brother. I'll call him Robby on the blog. Anyway, Robby functions at the level of a five-year-old, on a good day. He has a very rare genetic neurological disorder that I won't identify because it's so rare, that if I named it here, my blog would easily come up on a Google search.

Robby lives in a group home about ten miles from my parents and has for the past four years. He works at a sheltered workshop that's pretty close to where we live. My parents and I are co-guardians, and when they both die (which I hope won't be for a while), I will be solely in charge of Robby's life.

My mom called me this afternoon. She had Nora (so I could do some cleaning and preparing for Thanksgiving) and told me that Robby had probably dislocated his shoulder while at work. At first, she suggested that I bring him to their house and she would take him to an ER near her. However, I suggested that since a) he was in pain and b) I didn't have Nora with me, and c) I live 15 minutes from the hospital that I simply take him to the ER myself. She agreed, and so I picked him up from work and took him to the ER.

We proceeded to spend the next two hours in the ER, only to find out that Robby no longer had a dislocated shoulder (we think it probably popped back in at some point, which is what happened last time) and they sent him home with a sling (that he refused to wear) and instructions to take Tylenol or Advil for pain. Mom pulled up to the ER entrance and we swapped "packages", so she took Robby home and I took Nora home (she had to pull up to the entrance because the hospitals in our area have banned children under 18 from visiting, due to the H1N1 situation).

While I would never choose an afternoon in the ER for a brother-sister bonding session, it was nice to be able to spend some time with Robby. I'd forgotten how amusing he can be; when I told him about Junior, he said, "you've got to be kidding me." Twice. Then, when the nurse tried to put the sling on him, he said, "no, I don't need it" and wouldn't let them put it on him.