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Well, last week Mom was stuck in the hospital. We took her to the ER on Sunday night--her leg was quite swollen and painful, and it had been that way for several days. Turned out she had DVT--a ginormous clot in her leg. The doctor said they wanted to put her in the hospital overnight for observation. We've now learned that's ER speak for "I have no idea how long you're going to be here, but I don't want to say anything to make you bolt, so I'll just fib a little and imply that's just going to be a one night stay..." Turns out that had to put her on all sorts of meds to thin her blood, and ultimately they put her on coumadin, then had to watch her blood--now she's on a schedule of constant blood testing. Anyway, she'd not been there very long when my Maggie Hogan came to visit and we went to see her. it was late in the evening, and we could hear the nurses struggling with Mom's roommate. Turns out she'd recently become initmately acquainted with the crash cart. Yet in no time flat, she (in her tye-died PJ's from home) got up and went to the bathroom. A minute later, she headed down the hall--she made it about four feet when she kind of collapsed against the wall. She looked sort of stoned. (Um--as if I know what stoned looks like?!) She was trying to walk home... When I went to see mom the next day, her bed was all made up! Just like in the movies when someone, well, you know. Fortunately a nurse saw me and pointed me to a private room. "How'd you manage a private room?" I asked. Turns out that Tie Dye tried to kill herself a couple of hours after we had left the night before. By the time the nurses got there, she had stopped breathing, was purple and they had to bring in the crash cart. Again. And Mom's supposed to avoid stress. She liked her new room, but she was kept up all night the next night by a man who continuously banged his remote against his bedrail. Later that day she reported that there were police all over the floor--one of them in her door--looked like maybe they were trying to keep someone from going into her room. But the banging was stopped--apparently they removed Remote-man. When we visited later that day, I watched another policeman bring a gurney in, and two policemen take someone out in the gurney. The upside is that after that gurney left, we no longer heard them yelling at Mary--"Mary, take your medicine! ...Mary, we brought you your medicine! You need to take your medicine!" At any rate--we decided that they must have put Mom on the wrong floor...she did get thanked by the nurses for being such an easy patient, and for not causing trouble, LOL. Of course, I'm not sure how much care she got--not to mention that after they did an ultrasound of her kidneys, they informed her that she had a stint that should have been taken out, as well as two kidney stones. She spent the next week trying to figure out how she missed having a stint put in! Then the doctor casually informed her that must have come from someone else's film! I don't think she'll be letting me take her back to the hospital for a while... |
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Posted by Kris