Monday, April 20, 2015

Mom's Escapades

When a frail woman's walker meets a snag on the parking lot, at the same time a gust of wind pushes at her, the results are not happy. 

My mom fell last week.  She was unresponsive.  The trauma team's first concern was the bleeding in her head.  Second concern was getting her on dialysis.  They finally got around to a feeding tube, both for nutrition and some critical daily medicine that's available orally but not for IV's.  For the first few days there were some brief periods of mumbled speech and quasi-awareness.  But after three days she finally began to wake up.  That's also how long it took us to convince the doctors to take x-rays to check for a broken hip. "Our first concern is the head trauma."  Right, guys.  And that's been stabilized, so quit poo-pooing her excruciating pain and check for broken bones.

After two days of her "being here" again, delirium set in.  My brother finally convinced the doctors to treat the infection she had begun prior to the fall, the infection which was the reason for taking Mom out to the doctor last week, which was when she fell. 

Mom is lucid again and has improved enough to leave ICU.


At one point last week, when she was first beginning to wake up and there was great pain from being repositioned, Mom said, "Jesus died for me.  That's all that matters.  He died for me.  That's the big thing."  Yes.

And when I was remarking on her doozy of a black eye, I suggested that she looked like she'd been in a fight.  "A fight with the sidewalk," she mumbled.  Yes.  I agreed.  Mom quipped, "The sidewalk won."  Ah, a sense of humor peeking out from behind all those injuries!