The Show Stopper - Hospital Stuff

I have a list of seven (maybe eight) items to blog about that I worked up last night before going to bed. This tells you how much free time my brain has on it. It was too late to really sit down and focus, but I didn't want to forget this stuff (all minor).

My goal this morning was to clean around the house in the morning and erase the Luis-depredations of of the weekend (having that man home for three days is a hardship), then dress for success in living in my hammock with laptop in han-- lap --to catch up on my various musings. It was not to be.

Around 10h30 I get a call from my father... which is a bit on the early side and surprising since I spoke to him last night. So he told me that Ma threw up last night/this morning and the doc's consensus was to send her to the hospital. So Ray called me right after Wayne Ambulance took her to go to St. Joseph's hospital. It's not my favourite place, but it beats Chilton and it is livable.

By the time 1230 rolled around, I made my first polite inquiry as to when we will get assistance. I was informed they'd only one ER doc and they were kind busy but by 1300 they would have a second doc and could get better answers. OK. Right at 1400, just as I was preparing to find someone with a slightly less patient mien, a PA walked in and began running through her history and etcetera. Since she cannot communicate, they are running a series tests. He said it will take a couple of hours. We will see what happens.

Ma had a series of strokes starting in early 2008. She had already had a history of seizures since 2006, so at that point I was beginning to worry about real strokes (seizures can be the sign and symptom or the entire problem; at some point, those seizures may be a symptom of a stroke. A stroke, in general, is more serious than seizures, and she had a history (distant) of TIAs.

The strokes she had in 2008 started out small but finally culminated in a big one at the end of May, the same day Ray came home from the rehab place after hip replacement #1. She refused care from the EMTs she called and when I saw her I said she'd had a stroke and she argued. OK. Whatever. (These conversations get really, really old after a short while.)

Well, she had an even bigger stroke in September and went into the same rehab center as Ray when he had had hip replacement #2. She was there until mid-December. She came home with limited ability to speak and the right side of her body paralyzed. Ray has been her caretaker ever since.

She's been in and out of the hospital and sometimes rehab a few times. The last time she was taken off coumadin because of stomach ulcers. This time (at the time of this post, now 2141) it appears on initial scans that part of her heart has died (otherwise known as a myocardial infarction). Now things look different. Maybe this is it. (Considering the quality of life we aren't talking about, this is not as distressing as you may think.)

So we will see. So much for days in my hammock.