It has been an interesting week. If today is any indication, it could prove to be interesting for a while longer. I’m generally up for a good challenge although, I must admit, I wouldn’t have signed up for this one. But, I guess, if I had thought it through better, I would have known that when I moved my mom to Colorado, extended visits to the hospital were likely to be a part of my immediate future.
If I’m being truthful about it, hospitals scare me. People in physical pain scare me. The sights and sounds and smells scare me. It is all just not my ‘thing.’ Neither are amusements parks (for somewhat similar reasons) but that is a different story.
Like it or not, this week I’ve spent many hours inside the hospital where my mother has been hooked up to various monitors and IV drips and other sundry equipment. When I got the telephone call that she had been transferred to the Intensive Care Unit, I dreaded going there for a number of reasons. Not the least of which was encountering people who were extremely sick. And dying. Including my mother.
As it turned out, it wasn’t as bad as I anticipated. I’ve seen and heard and smelled all manner of things this week that, had you asked, I would have told you I couldn’t handle. But, I can. I guess it is true that we can handle more than we think we can.
Or so I thought. Apparently I can handle the sights and smells. But handling my mother is something all together different.
She was transferred to the cardiac floor after her stay in ICU. Yesterday she just needed to sleep. That was easy. When I arrived today, however, I unwittingly hopped on the erratic-heart-function-rollercoaster, with my mother as the crazy ride operator. Like something out of a horror film.
Did I mention I don’t like amusement parks?
Through a series of events, my mother’s heart rate jumped from a nice, easy going, 55 beats per minute to a terrifying 170 beats per minute in a matter of seconds. Sort of the manic depressive of internal organs.
While nurses scurried to do what they could to bring her heart rate down and people came in the room with EKG machines and blood pressure cuffs and a cardiac physician was ordering medications and tests, my mother seemed unconcerned.
After a couple of episodes of this, she was told she had to lie down and could not sit up. She objected, although prior to the racing heart adventures all she had done was lie down. Suddenly, it became exceedingly important to sit up. When the nurse said she couldn’t sit up because she risked having a stroke, my mother scoffed and said she wasn’t going to have a stroke.
And then it started. She complained. And complained. And complained. This tiny, frail, exceedingly ill, little old lady was ready to hop out of bed and start walking the halls. She was bored. She was restless. They expected her to lie in bed all day? I reminded her that she had been lying in bed all day for the past seven days. What is one more?
Up until that moment she had needed assistance to sit up, move her limbs...pretty much to do anything. I have had to feed her every day! But, once she was told she had to lie in bed she refused, and before I knew what was happening she sat up in bed, swung her spindly little legs over the side and said, “I can’t lie here any longer.” The infection she has been fighting definitely affects her thinking and reasoning, but at that moment she seemed perfectly lucid and with white downy hair standing straight up and the back of her hospital gown gaping open, she was determined to get out of that bed!
I gave her my sternest look and told her to sit right there. I was pretty confident she wasn’t strong enough to stand up on her own but, at that moment, I wasn’t really sure what she was capable of! I proceeded to jog down the hall to the nurse’s station where I informed them of what was happening. Because they could view her heart monitor at the station, they looked at her heart rate and proceeded to run down the hallway to intervene in her great escape and get her to lie back down.
She reluctantly complied and fell asleep. By the time she awoke, the beta blocker she had been given was doing its job and her heart appeared capable of keeping an appropriate and regular rhythm. She was eventually allowed to sit in a chair and that seemed to make her happier.
Up until today, I haven't been sure how she had managed to live through this week. I don’t think anyone really expected her to. Of course, I can’t predict what will happen next, but given the level of determination I saw today, I have the feeling she’s planning to stick around a while longer.
It would be nice, however, if I could stay off the Tilt-a-Whirl for a few days.
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