She was moved from ICU to 5th floor, I think, and spent 4 1/2 days there, then was transported via Medride to Jim Thorpe Rehab. She was making great progress, regaining strength, learning to walk again, to feed herself, to dress herself and do the activities of daily living. She got a UTI and I believe this is where she contracted a Staph infection. She was on a mega dose of Cipro for the UTI which caused her to have diarrhea. To say the least, her diarrhea caused her rehab to go down the toilet, no pun intended. She stayed in rehab until the Friday after Thanksgiving, I think it was the 4th of December and was transferred to Meadowlake Estates which is a skilled nursing facility. She was there until the 11th of December. I got a call about 6am to tell me they were transporting her to the ER by ambulance because her oxygen level was low. We got to the ER and they diagnosed her with pneumonia and a UTI. They started her on antibiotics for the pneumonia and antiobiotics for the UTI. They did blood cultures, broncoscopy, urine tests, stool cultures, more blood cultures and found that she had Staph which meant more antiobiotics, all by IV. Day after day after day she got worse and worse and weaker and weaker, she could not roll over, sit up, feed herself, she was seeing things and telling some really wild stories. My brother, husband and myself were staying round the clock with her taking 8 hour shifts. I really thought she was going to die. One night while my husband was with her they moved her to CCU because her heart rate jumped to around 200 then would drop down to 40. They were scrambling to get her heart rate to stabilize and the stool cultures came back and showed C-diff which meant that now we had to gown and glove to go into her room. I keep thinking, what else can go wrong. After 2 1/2 days in CCU she was moved to another room. We still had to glove and gown to go in and just before Christmas the doctor said they would be moving her to another facility. I was livid. Here we are with a big bad infection that we have to gown and glove up for and they are wanting to move her out of the hospital to another facility, I looked that doctor right in the eye and told him I was not the least bit happy about this move. The move happened the next day and it made no difference if I was happy or not. The new facility was able to do all that was done in the "real" hospital, doctors, nurses, rehab, etc and this is where the "not so nice mama came to be". To be honest, she was downright mean and nasty at times. She was so ugly to one of the therapists that I felt the need to apologize to her on a regular basis and try to explain to her that this really is not like my mama.
We stayed in this facility until the 17th of January and was moved back to Meadowlake Estates. Again, she was diagnosed with a UTI. They put her on Cipro again and I thought "oh boy, here we go again". Once we finally got all the infections cleared up and the heart rate back to normal she began to feel better, but was still so very weak that they had to use a lift to get her in and out of bed and this scared the waddin' out of her. She began to work really really hard in therapy. The therapists call her their "miracle patient". She planned to leave there and move to our house the 1st of May, but decided that she did not want to stay there any longer and changed the date to April 1.
Somewhere along the way she decided that she would no longer be able to live at home and care for herself or her husband and told us that she thought it was time to sell her house. I think that when she made that decision is when her mental attitude changed and she made such great strides in her therapy.
More about what has happened since she moved in later.
No comments:
Post a Comment