If I Told You , You Wouldn’t Believe Me

After they figured out what was wrong with mom things started happening pretty fast. They took most of the invasive tubes out of her and here she is sitting up in a chair after her X-rays and EKGs:

The bad part is now we have to suit up to go in to visit. I am wondering if I can knit with those funky rubber gloves on my hands…pics later lol!

We’ll head over there as soon as I post this and my Myspace blog. Oh, I have to return the wheelchair to Brady’s Rent All first….whoops.

Shane stayed all night at the hospital because mom’s condition was so degraded. I went home about 10 PM (yes, I drove…get over it already)

He called me just a few minutes ago with the diagnosis…C Diff, a bacterial infection that causes the severe diarrhea she’s been experiancing. It is thought that antibiotics cause the over abundance of this relatively harmless bacteria which is present everywhere. Mom had taked a course of strong antibiotics for bronchitis recently. Here are a couple of articles about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clostridium_difficile (scroll down there’s a some white space before the article)

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/c-difficile/DS00736

This makes me hope that once they control the infection mom can come back and have some more time with me. She is going to need to get those long fingernails removed. I’ll let you read the articles and draw your own conclusions as to why.

1) Hold your loved ones hand

2) Read

3) Eat

4) Talk to strangers

5) Ride up and down in the elevators or walk up and down the stairs if you feel froggy

6) Stare out the window

7) People watch
Use your brother’s laptop to blog

9) Crack jokes to keep from crying

and my all time favorite:

10) KNIT!!!!!!!!

We had hoped mom would be doing better today but she’s not. The DR finally came after 12:30 PM and got her info…the reports from Chicago and Tennessee, the CDs with the MRI scans and he asked a ton of questions. At one point he asked about Hospice and Mother spoke up and said NO! although she had been silent up till then besides telling him she wasn’t in any pain. He asked who she was staying with and I raised my hand. He then asked if she could walk…no….does she have control of her bowels…no….well I guess he got the point. Shane has promised to push the point of out-of-home Hospice because he knows I can’t do it with her like this.

One good point…they are moving her to another room , this one with a view . I hope it’s a private room because it isn’t fair to make a room mate smell her dirty diapers all day. I am not sure why they don’t clean the patients up as soon as they make a mess but I can’t do it because of the Foley catheter. Oh my what a sad situation!

More later…Jack is fixing supper at the house and we need to get over there.

They kept mom overnight for observation and because they couldn’t get her BP up even though they gave her 4 liters of fluids. My main concern was that she hadn’t urinated since they first put the Foley catheter in…(After Deanna had her brain surgery I was questioning the calcium deposits I saw in her Foley bag. The nurse assured me it was perfectly normal. From her ICU bed Deanna said “Quit looking at my urine! I don’t look at your urine so stop looking at mine!” At that point I knew she was going to be ok…)

Mom was much more responsive when we left at 9 PM last night. She looked a heck of a lot better too. Shane wants to hurry me out the door now but I still have some stuff to do. I want to take mom some flowers from my garden and I still need to do my hair and fix my face and I need to wear stylish clothes or Shane might nominate me for What Not to Wear along with my sister Judy.

Mom did not get any better. At 2:30 PM Shane and I made the decision to come to the Penrose St Francis ER. Here we sit smelling mom’s soiled diaper waiting for the DR. I’ll post more when I know something.

Yes, poop can be celebrated as previous blogs here at mommycity.com have proved, but personally I’ve just about had it with the stinky stuff!

My mom has had diarrhea all day and she can’t control her bowels. She was smelling to high heaven when I came home from grocery shopping. I asked her if she had an accident and she got all offended about it. Ok whatever…she even told Shane I had asked her if she messed her britches. Later she asked me to take her to the bathroom and yep, sure enough she had made a poop in her Depends. I got her changed and she hobbled back out to the living room to watch TV.

The next time she went she made an aweful mess. I offered to give her a bath but she declined. The third time she gave up and said yes. Of course this was right in the middle of me baking the pizza Jack brought home from Papa Murphy’s and setting the table for supper. I had to enlist his help on it and lucky for me he’s always happy to be in the kitchen (hmmmmm wonder how he feels about changing diapers?) I got her bathed and into a clean Depends and warm clothes.

Mom ate good but after she was done and I was cleaning up a bit she hollered for me as Shane was helping her down the hall towards the bathroom….whoops, another mess. This time I got smart and gave her some Imodium D. She layed down and went to sleep but not before declaring her stomach hurt and she thought she still had diarrhea. Shane has been checking on her and doing sniff tests. So far, so good. I stayed up and played Yahoo Pyramids and decided to write this blog. I am going to go fold the clothes and towels in the dryer and get my happy butt to bed.

If the situation doesn’t improve we may need a trip to the ER tomorrow.

It’s a learning experience…take one day at a time.

Mom got wore out yesterday. I guess we shouldn’t do all that in one day but we had no choice this time. Shane and I really struggled to get her where she needed to be like the bathroom, to the table to eat and so on. Her co-ordination was aweful and she couldn’t find her mouth with the straw or her fork. Also her legs wouldn’t work when she put weight on them. We have to seriously think about a Hospice Place at some point because I won’t be able to lift her by myself.

Jack and I went grocery shoppin early today and Shane had mom duty. It’s too cold for her to sit out and smoke all day…too bad eh? They were watching TV when we got back and Shane said she had walked herself to the bathroom when she got up.

I showed her some pictures on the computer that Deanna and my cousin, Dean, sent me. She saw the picture of herself smelling the sweet peas yesterday and said “I wonder how Dean got that picture of me?” I explained it was already on my computer. I haven’t told her I’m writing this blog so keep it quiet, ok?

Yeah yeah it’s “Take time to stop and smell the roses” but I have a new twist on it.

My mom’s sense of smell is not only intact but absolutely enhanced for some reason…she can smell a fart a mile away lol!

On the way home from Tennessee we stopped at a Dairy Queen in Kansas. Terry and I got chili cheese dogs and mom and Judy got hamburgers. When we were back on the road we noticed mom sniffing her fingers.

“Mom, what are you doing?” Judy asked.

She replied…”I can smell different things under each of my my fingernails” Hahahahahaaha!!!!!!! What!?! Then she proceeded to sniff each one and announce what it was…mustard, pickle, so on and so forth.

Judy said “Wow I hope you didn’t scratch your butt.” (Insert hysterical laughter here)

Last night I noticed some of my sweet peas were blooming so I picked them for mom to smell. She was delighted and made Shane smell them too.

Shane and I got her up and going early today coz the weather is going to take a nasty turn tonight and tomorrow. We went to the Farmer’s Market at Memorial Park…they sat in the car while I went for green tomatoes and some squash and sweet corn. Then we went to IHOP for breakfast, the dentist for advice on the broken plate, the lab where we dropped the plate off, home to potty and drop off the veggies, Post Office to mail out Deanna and Brian’s wedding gift, library, Silver Key Senior Service to inquire about a wheelchair (wait until Tuesday and get a prescription for one so Medicare will pay for it), back to the lab to get her choppers, Walgreens to get the pictures I had sent in and some other stuff and finally Taco Bell for lunch. Mom didn’t get out of the car after the first lab visit and potty break but it still caused her legs to quit wanting to work which is not good coz it takes both me AND Shane to get her situated I’m a little worried about what’s going to happen after he leaves…she’s now down for a nap…I think I’ll go take one too.

My mom has cancer. Not just cancer, but non-operable, small cell lung cancer. The kind that rapidly goes anywhere it pleases, like your brain, liver, bones. It’s not good.

She was diagnosed in Sept of 2007. She and I had sorta been on the outs because she never would come visit me here in Colorado. She went to Tennessee, Florida, Philidelphia, Maine and Arizona but always had some excuse for not coming here. Looking back I guess she was afraid she couldn’t breathe up here but at the time it really made me hurt and angry and I quit talking to her for about two months.

Then one day I got a phone call from her. She had been planning on having her bunions fixed and they did a routine chest x-ray. She said “They’ve found something”

And so it began.

My sister wanted her to come to Tennessee but she declined. She said Aunt Karen would take her to treatments. My sister went up for the first laser surgery and was there when she was diagnosed. She immediately looked it up online and knew right away the prognosis was grim.

I had a trip planned in Oct to the Chicago area to see my friend Sue and my kids, so I stayed one night with mom after Sue’s. At this point I didn’t feel the need to hang around…I mean…hadn’t I begged her to come see me and she never would? I got some harsh feedback from a few people about it but I look at it this way…we begged her to quit smoking for years and years, we offered her a plane ticket out to Colorado, we this and we that…I gave her a Bible and a What Does the Bible Really Teach book and I arranged for some sisters from the local Kingdom Hall to call on her and I left with a clean conscience.

My sister and brother, Shane, went up at Thanksgiving. I called every few days or so…Mom went through chemo and radiation and as far as I knew everything was rolling along as planned. Then in March she had an “episode” Seems she wasn’t eating right, drinking enough fluids, absolutely no exercise so she got dehydrated and developed blood clots in her legs. She was talking out of her head and couldn’t stand up so Aunt Karen took her to the ER.

My sister again went to Chicago, this time with her husband and my brother Woody. Two of my kids and their spouses went too. They got mom into a rehab place but with little hope of a recovery.

I couldn’t make it when mom was in the hospital but I took the train out again April 16 to help pack up her stuff and for moral support. (Side note: I refused to drive, relying instead on public transportation and taxis…it drove everyone mad but how was it any of their business anyways?) I stayed 9 days and proclaimed mom well enough to go to Judy’s in Tennessee.

At this point I should mention that Judy was not thrilled that mom wanted to now come to her house. Hadn’t she asked her to come before, you might wonder? Well, yes, but this was different. This was thrust upon her in the most unbelievable way…my aunt gave up the apt and my mom was basically homeless. My sister gave up a big to-do at her husband’s place of employment to go pick my mom up and then the fun really began.

The Drs in Chicago kept declaring my mom “cancer free” yet she rapidly went downhill. She rallied for a bit then BOOM! she started falling and finally hurt herself bad enough to land in the ER which resulted in a MRI revealing that the cancer was in her brain, liver, spleen, ribs and who know where else.

I had made plans to visit in early August and my sister begged me to bring mom back with me…Jack agreed and to make a long story short, here we are in Colorado…my mom can barely walk but she’s still able to think. I have had a steady stream of family in and out. My brother Shane is here now and we hope to get her in Hospice after her Drs appt next week. In the mean time I am wiping her butt, putting her bib on at meals and answering her 1000s of questions as gently as I can…it’s like having a 100 lb baby…I have thus become “My Mother’s Mommy”