Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Roller Coaster Through Hell

That pretty much sums up the last few days for me. I visited my mom in the hospital on Sunday and she seemed to be improving. She could walk, her speech was better and she remembered things that before she couldn't. My family was still very frustrated because nobody seemed to know much about what she came in there for in the first place. The running theory was she may have had a small stroke. I understand that sometimes things aren't always black and white and that's fine. If the staff of the hospital doesn't know what happened, fine tell us that. I bet they do know alot of what didn't happen from the MRI, 3 CT scans, blood work and Ultrasound on her liver. Surely they learned something from those.
To make matters significantly worse, Friday she started coming out of the heavy sedation they had her on initially. She was very agitated and we found out that on Tuesday when they did the MRI, someone held her down to get her in the @#@%* machine. My mom is EXTREMELY claustrophobic and so was noted on her records. That freaked her out and when she came around on Friday, she wanted the hell out of there. She fell trying to get up to go to the bathroom and before my dad could catch her, they both were down. She hit her head and sustained a subdural hematoma. They began to watch that closely, giving her 3 more CT scans over the weekend. Sunday she seemed to be improving alot.
Monday she had trouble with her speech again and was very weak. At about 9:00am I talked to my dad and sister about her condition and I went over to the hospital after work (5:30). It had taken all @%*^^$& day and my sister going to hospital administration to get someone to be a little concerned with what was happening. At 5:30, we finally got a neurosurgeon in to examine her and he ordered another CT scan. By 10:00 Monday night they were prepping her for emergency surgery to cut the top of her head off and drain the fluid from her brain. At about 4:00am Tuesday, the neurosurgeon (who was visibly shaken) came to us and told us it was much worse than the scan showed and he couldn't stop her from bleeding because her blood wasn't clotting properly.
He also told us that he didn't think she would live.
They rolled her out of surgery and into ICU with the top of her head still off (I wish this was a bad dream but it isn't), they put the section of her skull they removed inside her abdomen for safe keeping in case they needed to put it back later. (I promise I am not making anything up.) We left the hospital awhile to .... I don't know.
By the time I got back to the hospital at 9:00, she was still alive and by 3:00pm yesterday, she was stable enough and had improved enough to go back to surgery to finish it.

We don't know at this point if she is going to live or not and if she does live who is she going to be I guess only God knows that answer.

There's other questions we are going to get answers for. Like how do you get from showing signs of improving on day to showing significant signs of neurological issues (weakness and uncoordination on only one side of the body - the left side, the side opposite of the side where she hit her head)the next to emergency surgery. The surgeon admitted to us that someone misread some of her scans and that it shouldn't have gotten to the point it did. The Hospital will have some serious questions to answer at some point.

For now though, we are waiting to see what happens next. The other stuff can wait.

2 comments:

Mike T said...

Sorry to read the news, all you guys will be in our thoughts and prayers.

Hang in there..

Riding with dogs said...

I'm sorry to hear about your Mom, she'll be in our prayers as well.