There Are Days, and Then There Are Days

I was planning to ride last Saturday after I finished my morning walk with the dogs, horses and the goat. I was contemplating where I would go to further explore the home trails, and what I wanted to do with my saddle, when I saw my husband coming toward us.

It is beyond unusual for my husband to voluntarily come out on a walk. In fact, it's unheard of. So I immediately knew something was up. He handed me his phone (I'd left mine at home) and told me to call my sister, our mother was being transported by ambulance to the hospital.

My husband doesn't have my sister's cell phone number in his phone, so the only number I had available was for her home. I spoke briefly with my brother-in-law. He told me Mom had started showing signs of confusion. She had gone to her volunteer job as a tax preparer and he "boss" quickly realized something wasn't right. He called for an ambulance.

I wasn't overly concerned because Mom has had episodes of confusion in the past related to her blood sugar. She is a Type 2 diabetic. Recently she's been dieting and has lost a significant amount of weight. The result was, one of the drugs she was on for her diabetes was causing her blood sugar levels to tank. She stopped taking that med, but I still felt it was possible her problem was the result of her medications.
My dogs showed me just how much stress I was under. Only Tanner – who is pudgy and unlikely to ever turn down food under any circumstance – ate breakfast. The other three looked like they couldn't think about food.

I started making phone calls to let people know what was going on and make sure things at church would be covered. Mom plays in the Wednesday night bell choir (UUbellation) and they were scheduled to play in both services the next day. I ended up playing her position myself, as I had to be there for both services anyway for Chalice Choir and the new Women's Choir.

My sister called to update me on what was going on with Mom. Mom was unable to communicate clearly. She would start out a sentence well enough but quickly deteriorate into nonsense syllables. She also had trouble understanding what was said to her. The ER doctor had decided Mom had most likely suffered a mild stroke. He admitted her for further diagnostics.

By the time my husband, daughter and I reached the hospital, Mom was being moved into a room. My sister was in the visitor lounge waiting for Mom to be settled in her room. My sister needed to leave to be with her two younger children while her husband and eldest son went to take care of an errand they had to get done that day. So my sister left, and it was me, my husband, my daughter, and my "volunteer sister," who is my sister's best friend from high school and lives with our mother.

Once Mom was in the room, we all went in to see her. The signs all said no more than 2 people at a time, but we promptly ignored them. All of us were in the room when the nurse came in. My first notion we might not be in a hospital we wanted to be in was when that nurse walked in and blanched at our presence. Clearly she did not want us around. And our further experiences with her did nothing to change our original impression of her.

In the ER, my sister was told Mom would receive an MRI, although the CT she had when she first arrived came back negative. The ER doctor clearly still believed Mom had suffered a stroke, even if it didn't show on the CT.

I eventually sent my daughter and husband to retrieve Mom's car from the Kroc Center, where she had driven in order to do her "job." We knew it was safe enough there at least until night, but realized we had to get it out of there.

While we waited – and waited, and waited – for Mom to be seen by any sort of doctor, she improved markedly. She went from "speaking in tongues" to being reasonably understandable. She was able to understand what we said, but she complained she couldn't bring to mind the words she wanted to say. She had the most trouble with her medication names. If she spoke very briefly, she was clear, but the more she spoke the less sense she made. It didn't take me long to figure out what words she meant, and I was able to understand her reasonably well.

The nurse was in several times for various tasks, but still no doctor. At one point I mentioned she was suspected to have had a stroke, at which point the nurse said no, she wouldn't be on that floor if she had had a stroke. Okay, so what the hell's going on? In fact, I learned later from a client who works in that hospital that Mom certainly would have been sent to that floor for a stroke!

Mom's blood pressure was very high, and we were able to discover she had forgotten to take her medications in the morning. More like she had forgotten how. She knew she needed to take something, but couldn't get the steps together to do it. She also was unable to remember how to make her breakfast. Yet she had remembered she needed to go to the tax job and had driven herself there.

Someone (I'm assuming the attending physician) decided – without ever laying eyes on Mom – to give her high blood pressure meds. It was many hours later when the attending finally did come in and do an assessment. I was not impressed with the guy. He kept looking to speak to me rather than my mother, which annoyed me. Mom was able to understand what was going on just fine, and for her own dignity he should have been speaking to her. I rather subtly made that point when he asked a question and I turned to Mom and repeated the question to her.

My daughter left with my sister and her husband and daughter for dinner after she and my husband had retrieved Mom's car. They went out for some dinner, and my husband and I stayed with Mom until her roommate was able to arrive. I needed to get home before too long. While nobody at home would starve, I did want to get them fed before it got very late.

By the time we left, Mom still hadn't had an MRI done. And the neurologist had not been in to see her, either. I was beginning to be more than a little frustrated with the lack of care I felt Mom was receiving. My sister and I discussed moving her if they wanted to keep her for much longer. Hindsight being 20/20, we should have walked her out when she hadn't received an MRI, much less been seen by a doctor, four hours after she had been admitted to the hospital. She was perfectly ambulatory, so taking her to a different hospital would have been no trouble at all. And I'd really like to see them stop me from getting my mother out of there.

My sister went back to the hospital after she had had dinner, and noticed a marked improvement in Mom's condition in the few hours since she had last seen her. Also, the nurse shift had changed, and the new nurse was significantly better than the first one. She asked if Mom knew why she was there, and stated it was believed Mom had suffered a stroke. We decided Mom was safe enough by herself over night, and we all went home.

In the morning I went to church and my sister went to be with Mom. An interesting thing about this hospital. There was no accommodation for visitors. No chair in the room or anything. It was like they expected people to visit and just leave. We felt Mom needed a strong advocate with her at least during the day. So a chair was purloined from the visitor lounge, and one of the nurses' chairs was brought in, so we had a place to sit. No one said anything, but I had the distinct feeling we weren't really welcome.

Mom was finally seen by the neurologist on Sunday morning. He examined her briefly, then informed Mom and my sister that he believed Mom was suffering from a "confusional migraine." My sister being the person she is, she promptly researched the condition and found Mom only had one symptom matching confusional migraine. The neurologist still ordered an MRI, but we were a bit insulted he had given us this sort of pat-on-the-head answer without ruling out more serious conditions.

Mom had an MRI at about noon, and I showed up at the hospital to relieve my sister around 1pm. My sister headed home and I stayed with Mom. I hoped to meet this "neurologist" who had come up with his "diagnosis" before even having an MRI done. My sister told me she felt the neurologist had dismissed her concerns and minimized Mom's condition. Her impression was he thought Mom was just a dotty old lady with a daughter who didn't want to face that her mother was aging. Mom is only 75. The very notion that she has already become "dotty" is laughable. I wondered how many of her friends and associates I'd need to bring in to refute this guy's initial impression. I'm rather glad I never met him. I may have been inclined to shove him out the window. The windows, incidentally, did not open.

Not long after I arrived, the MRI tech came back for Mom. The doctor wanted additional images. This was not good news to me. It meant the doctor was suspicious of something he had seen and wanted to confirm it. I stayed as late as I reasonably could, knowing I needed to be back in the morning, but the neurologist neither called nor showed up.

At 6:30 on Monday morning, I got a call from my sister. The neurologist had finally deigned to let us know what was going on. Mom had had a stroke, but an atypical one. The way he described it was, a blood clot had gone up into Mom's brain but instead of sticking and creating one huge area of damage, it had broken into several pieces and created between ten and fifteen small areas of damage. He wanted two more tests, the results of which would determine if Mom would go home that day or not.

When I got back to the hospital, Mom had been put back on "fall risk" status and was not allowed to get up without the nurse. This was based strictly on the diagnosis of stroke, not on any evidence Mom had somehow lost the ability to get around on her own. The nurse had turned on the bed alarm, so if Mom so much as swung her legs off the bed the alarm would go off. It was very frustrating for her, as she knew perfectly well she was able to get about on her own and didn't need someone to come help her go to the bathroom, five feet from the bed.

After the additional tests had been done, we were (eventually) told Mom had 70% blockage in her right carotid artery and 50% blockage in her left artery. This was not good news. The attending doctor still needed to hear from the neurologist but felt it likely Mom would be staying and having a procedure to clear the blockage in her right artery. Privately, in my own mind, I decided if the neurologist wanted this procedure, I would be bundling Mom out of that godforsaken place and taking her to a real hospital.

A few hours later the attending told us Mom would be released. Mom couldn't have heard better news. Once she had signed the papers, it was all I could do to keep her from walking out under her own power. Indeed, she did end up walking out to the car to go home. I left her in the care of my volunteer sister and headed off to Monday night bell choir rehearsal.

This would seem to be the end of story, and how I wish it were. Stay tuned for the next installment (this has gotten rather too long already). You can read my sister's story of this incident here. Warning: my sister is a romance author, and there is cover art from her books on her blog. Just want to be careful anyone who might be offended or doesn't want their kids seeing these images is forewarned. In my opinion, they are tasteful if a bit racy. Hey, it's romance cover art!