Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

My Mom is in the hospital!

Finally, my mother is getting the full medical treatment that she deserves and which I have fought for since the Banner Boswell ER failed to admit and treat her condition on June 2.

When her caretaker arrived at 9:30 this morning, she found my mother lying on the floor next to the new hospital bed we had installed for her a day ago.  I do not know how it happened I was not there.  I did not even know that my mother had been transferred from her bed in the bedroom which had sidebars to prevent her from getting up at night and falling, to the new hospital bed.  Hospice had told me that they would make a nonemergency call to the paramedics to transfer from one bed to the other.  When this took place I do not know, but likely a caretaker transferred her and did not put up the side rails of the hospital bed.  I will find out but I do not know at this point.

The caretaker called her supervisor and supervisor called paramedics who took her to the Banner-Boswell ER.  I told them that she had had a hard time there a month ago and they refused to treat, but I figured that after all the trouble I made, they treat are much better this time---and they did!

The difference was night and day.  When I arrived at the ER there were 12 medical personnel in the little ER room with my mother and another for five outside including the paramedics and two security guards.  It was a scene out of the TV show ER, or the current Code Black.  There were people everywhere running around back and forth.  They would let me in and I had to sit in the waiting room while he worked on her.  Because she was so dehydrated was very difficult to find a vein and I could hear her moan when they tried. 

Eventually they let me in and there were still two nurses with her.  She had a leader bag of saline solution being administered IV.  They were very concerned because her blood pressure was reading 78/38.  They added two more bags of saline solution for a total of 3000 mL, and the blood pressure was returning to her normal, which was about 100/65.

They put in a central line in her neck.  I was with her for three or four hours while she got many tests including whole upper body CT scan, x-rays, multiple blood tests, and constant vital monitoring.

Finally, they were treating my mother as someone who deserved to be alive, not as someone to be sent home to go into hospice.  Apparently my efforts to make her situation known, including two hospital personnel, had its effect.

Later on, the ER doctor called me on my cell phone after I returned home, saying she was being admitted to intensive care, and wanted a history of what led up to this recent hospitalization.  He stated that there was some fluid in her lungs, and a high lactic acid buildup because of severe dehydration, and there may be a bacterial infection.  He stated that the CT revealed what could possibly be metastatic disorder in the liver and whether I wanted treated or not.  I told him she had a DNR, but that does not mean do not treat.  And he said of course, we will treat with medications all over disorders that we can.

Course of treatment now will be to see if she survives this.  Of extreme low blood pressure and failing kidneys, with atrial fibrillation, and a failing heart, and then she would be released to a rehab unit to see if she can bounce back to more normal functioning, and if not it could become her permanent home as a skilled nursing facility.

I know in previous postings I had become stoic accepting that she had been tossed away by the medical care system and thrown into hospice, where they refused to refuse to treat her severe dehydration, because they did not condone “aggressive” treatment, which means injections or an IV, but only treat symptoms medically.  I do not advise anyone to go on to hospice, because that means effectively that all “real” medical treatment ends, and they just wait for the patient to die peacefully in a coma, induced may be by dehydration, kidney failure, or heart failure.

So, my mother is getting the treatment she so much deserved a month ago, and I have to thank Banner-Boswell for so graciously accepting and aggressively treating my mother’s various diseases.  If she survives this period, and if we can push her a little harder to drink more water, she may survive a bit longer, and perhaps even get back to reading the newspaper and doing crossword puzzles.

About that fall she mysteriously sustained, she suffered no physical injuries, and feels no pain as a result.  The only pain she felt was from the neck restraint paramedics put on her before they picked her up.  She felt quite relieved after was removed.  There were no broken bones, no twisted joints that caused her pain.