The phone rang around 5 this morning and I knew. Mom had managed to activate her lifeline and it called 911 and then my sister....didn't call me because it was knocked over....but sis arrived to find Mother standing beside the bed stark naked and covered in blood. She went to the ER by ambulance and she had a seizure in the ER. When I arrived she was sedated to prevent more seizures and intubated. Sis couldn't see her that way and stayed near the end of the bed...I sat a held Mom's hand and talked to her. Once she started waking up they did extabate her and admitted her to ICU. She has her moments of being lucid, then she'll insist that she wants to watch channel 1147 or that she wants to watch her blood pressure on TV or that that particular number IS her BP.
We don't know what happened or for how long my Mother was injured. It's apparent from the blood on the exercise bike, on the carpet and the bed, not to mention the massive amounts of blood on HER that, oh, and the broken full length mirror that she fell and hurt herself and somehow managed to crawl to access her lifeline.....the blood trail tells us that.
She's alive and relatively stable. She's not lucid at this point, not for long, and today is critical to her eventual recovery. In a way it's probably best that she isn't real aware. This poor woman looks like someone took a baseball bat to her. There are NO broken bones, save a chipped bone in her thumb, miraculously, but she has multiple lacerations and is bruised head to toe. They are waiting on the EEG before they will give her pain meds. She is doing a jerking motion pretty regularly too. This could be a post seizure thing or it could be drug withdrawal. Her sodium and potasium are both quite low again.
I was with Mother yesterday and she went from mostly OK steadily downhill all afternoon. The hospital calls and activates her bp machine at 7......she sat adding the 3 numbers forever and couldn't....Mom is a math whiz and the treasurer for her church district. Couldn't add those 3 numbers (upper,lower and pulse rate) and why she felt the need to I'm not sure, nor could she tell me. Then when she tired of the numbers she opened the bottle to take a zoloft. I asked her about it and she said she was supposed to take one. Told her that if she needed it it would be in her pill sorter and had to SHOW her that it was before she finally put the pill back in the bottle. My being there seemed to agitate her so I came home but put Sis on alert, and we also decided that NO bottles of pills would be left in her house, just the sorters and a few of the one med she IS supposed to take if the BP is real high. The doc is now saying that Mom may not be able to be in the house without live in help and he's leaning towards either assisted living or a nursing home depending on how far back she can come.
She IS in there....I caught a number of glimpses of her buried in that fog and haze today.....but she's pretty far under all of that. I don't want her to suffer or be afraid, and she was so afraid and confused when she started coming around to find that tube in her throat. All I can ask for prayer wise is that God's will be done and that if it is time for her to go home, that she go gently and without fear.
Thanks you guys.