If we had no bad we'd have no luck at all

I really can't make this stuff up.  I'm not that imaginative, my life the last couple of weeks sounds like some sort of bad melodramatic TV show.

My last post left off sitting in the ER with Mom waiting on results.  They came back and declared that she  had broken her sacrum.  Mom was admitted to the hospital and hopped up on morphine for the pain.  The next day she was like somebody had pulled the string on a chatty Cathy doll.   Talk, talk, talk.  I sat next to her as my fever crept up and the crud that had taken down the kids and Hubby snuck up on me.  The next day I stayed home from the hospital and Hubby went and sat with Mom most of the day and reported that she mostly slept but they were going to move her to ICU as her O2 stats had fallen and they wanted to keep a closer eye on her.   I go in on Thursday and she is completely out of it, not lucid at all, tremors like she has Parkinson's and had dementia with repeated OCD like behaviors.  I sat with her all day and her O2 stats dropped off slowly throughout the day.  I stayed as long as I could stand it and went home. Around 10:30 I hear a retching noise and weak "Moma" filter down from upstairs.  Igor had puked EVERYWHERE.  I honestly think it was one of the worst puke disasters I've had to clean up as a parent.  Two hours later I hear a whimper and he was sick again, luckily I managed to get him to the toilet in time.  Later at 2:00 a.m. the hospital called and told me that they had put Mom on a vent but "DO NOT COME DOWN HERE THE ROADS ARE TOO BAD"  I only live about 5 blocks from our town's hospital but my experience and many years of watching assorted medical shows I knew it didn't matter if I was there or not as she would be heavily medicated.  At 6 a.m. I got an automated phone call from the school advising that school was cancelled.  I got up and made coffee, showered etc. to go the hospital figuring I could catch doctors since I was up anyway. 

I walked out the back door to find the world a sheet of ice.  I stepped gingerly down the first three steps and fell down the bottom two onto my hands and knees.  I checked myself out - no injuries other than pride - and shuffled and slid to the car.  I couldn't get the car out of the driveway - it's slightly inclined - and it nearly slid into the new truck.  Thankfully it didn't hit it as Hubby would have had his undies in a twist about that.  I carefully slid back into the house and got the truck keys then went down to the corner hardware store where they were doing a brisk business in sidewalk salt and got some for myself.  I went home, spread the salt and did a perfect butt plant that was so hard my teeth jarred together.  Honestly it was a good thing it happened so quickly, and my hands were full as I'd likely broken a wrist if I'd have gotten a hand down.

I get to the hospital finally and speak to the nurses and doctors and frankly they had no idea what was going on.  I called Mom's brothers and a close family friend to tell them what was happening.  One brother and the friend make flight reservations and arrived on Saturday.   The next few days were a blur of sitting at the hospital and watching Mom breathe through a straw.

Monday the 23rd they pulled the vent.  Mom was breathing on her own well but her blood pressure went through the roof as she struggled confused, agitated and in pain.  I had left my uncle home with the boys as he had pulled a morning shift with Mom at the hospital and he needed to go the airport around 4:00.  I called Hubby who was trying to squeeze a day in at work and had him come home to take my uncle to the airport because I felt I needed to be there to keep Mom calm.  The family friend that had come to town sat with me and the two of us did a dance of adjusting pillows, bed, and repeating to Mom every 5 minutes where she was and what had happened.  I stayed until 11:00 pm that night and was both physically and mentally exhausted when I left.

Tuesday and Wednesday went better with marked improvement in Mom's mental awareness and a steady removal of tubes, wires and the like.  Thursday she was doing fairly well, still in pain but seemed to be on the mend.  Friday (yesterday) she was transferred to Milwaukee for stent surgery which should happen early next week.  Today she is complaining a lot and I'm determined to keep her awake this evening as she has her day and night confused and called me at 4:45 a.m. this morning wondering if I was going to come visit her today.

The skinny is that is seems she overdosed on morphine.  Mom has kidney disease to top off all the other problems and she wasn't clearing the morphine but they kept giving her a normal dose.  Doesn't work so well.  More CT scans on her pelvis reveal more than just a fractured sacrum but several breaks that I was told were consistent with a high speed vehicle accident.  Due to the nature of the fracture and the fragility of her bones nothing but time - at least 6 weeks - to heal her pelvis.

In the middle of all the Mom drama a stomach bug has ravaged through the household and hit everyone but me.  I think it hit Hubby hardest as the kids seemed to bounce within 24 hours, and Hubby took closer to 48 hours.  I don't know how I managed to miss it (maybe I haven't).  I've also started my new position at the library too.  I had asked for a few days off at the beginning of the fiasco and then managed to squeeze in a couple of days of training the Thursday and Friday after Christmas as the family friend was in town and sat with Mom those days.  Oh, and our kitchen sink drain clogged up!


I apologize for the crazy disjointed writing.  I'm at the hospital with Mom and between the interruptions, crazy questions from Mom, and general loss of train of thought this is probably the worst thing I've written in ages.  Honestly I can't even read through the whole post without an interruption.