It's already a week since we got that alarming telephone call which dragged me from my work and hauled my sister across half the country during the dead of night and I held my mother's hand as she appeared to be drifting away from us, but, well, she's a resilient old bird and remains resolutely with us, despite the many ups and down of what has been a bloody long week.
The events of Tuesday evening, which I told you about in yesterday's posting, left me still feeling quite grim, to be honest, and another restless and worry-filled night followed before the dawn broke again.
Busy hospital wards are sometimes very difficult places to communicate with and it took my sister (now our approved "one point of contact...") much of the morning to finally get through, and by then I was in a meeting and so it was lunchtime before I heard the latest Wednesday update which was nothing much except to tell us that mum had had a "comfortable" night...
So, after another long weary day, I drove home to find the wardrobes in a state of near-completion (except for a few missing parts that I'm going to have to head back to the store to request) and a meal already in the oven which we ate before dragging ourselves back to the Ward for another hour of despair and anxiousness.
Because things were still not looking well. We arrived as mum was shouting out for a nurse although they all seemed to be on a break or otherwise engaged and it was a full fifteen minutes before one appeared, although by then mum seemed to have forgotten that she had been doing this instinctive calling out because we were now in the room.
When a nurse finally arrived at the desk, she told me that a particular nurse was dealing with mum today, who would come and talk to me, but it was another half hour until one actually did, and it was not the person who was originally mentioned because they never actually appeared at all. In fact, if we had not been in the room, I suspect that for the entire hour that we were there, no-one would have actually looked in on mum at all.
The nurse who did finally talk to me went off to consult the notes, so up-to-speed was she with mum's case, and told me that the bleeding had stopped but they were concerned about mum's breathing, and the fact that she sounded very "chesty" (which was more than obvious to us already) and that they were currently giving her oral medication for her "hospital acquired pneumonia" but were considering putting mum back on an I.V. drip due, in part, to her dehydration, although mum "didn't want them to..."
Mum, of course, seems to be saying "no" instinctively now, but I guess that gives them the excuse to say that they're respecting her wishes, because she's also resisting the nebuliser which should help her to breathe more easily, but she will drink if someone is with her, but still not enough of it really.
As you can imagine, the hour we spent in the ward wasn't all that much fun, but we did our best to be chatty and not too disturbing whilst all of these symptoms manifested themselves, and to persuade her to drink the odd sip of water which, naturally, would trigger awful sounding coughing fits, but this was another night on which I'm convinced that mum was really more asleep than awake for the duration, and obsessing over her bedtime again.
Having satisfied myself that a doctor would be seeing her again tomorrow, and that I had flagged up my concerns to the staff, we drifted off into the night whilst being not exactly reassured that the particular nurse in question had seemed overly optimistic. Mind you, that attitude had been catching, because my own wasn't either, and, when I was reporting the day's events to my sister on the phone later, she too had come to the conclusion that mum was unlikely to be walking away from this episode.
But we shall see. In the meanwhile, the waiting game just continues, and the telephone sits by my bedside every night and we shall just have to see what happens...
Busy hospital wards are sometimes very difficult places to communicate with and it took my sister (now our approved "one point of contact...") much of the morning to finally get through, and by then I was in a meeting and so it was lunchtime before I heard the latest Wednesday update which was nothing much except to tell us that mum had had a "comfortable" night...
So, after another long weary day, I drove home to find the wardrobes in a state of near-completion (except for a few missing parts that I'm going to have to head back to the store to request) and a meal already in the oven which we ate before dragging ourselves back to the Ward for another hour of despair and anxiousness.
Because things were still not looking well. We arrived as mum was shouting out for a nurse although they all seemed to be on a break or otherwise engaged and it was a full fifteen minutes before one appeared, although by then mum seemed to have forgotten that she had been doing this instinctive calling out because we were now in the room.
When a nurse finally arrived at the desk, she told me that a particular nurse was dealing with mum today, who would come and talk to me, but it was another half hour until one actually did, and it was not the person who was originally mentioned because they never actually appeared at all. In fact, if we had not been in the room, I suspect that for the entire hour that we were there, no-one would have actually looked in on mum at all.
The nurse who did finally talk to me went off to consult the notes, so up-to-speed was she with mum's case, and told me that the bleeding had stopped but they were concerned about mum's breathing, and the fact that she sounded very "chesty" (which was more than obvious to us already) and that they were currently giving her oral medication for her "hospital acquired pneumonia" but were considering putting mum back on an I.V. drip due, in part, to her dehydration, although mum "didn't want them to..."
Mum, of course, seems to be saying "no" instinctively now, but I guess that gives them the excuse to say that they're respecting her wishes, because she's also resisting the nebuliser which should help her to breathe more easily, but she will drink if someone is with her, but still not enough of it really.
As you can imagine, the hour we spent in the ward wasn't all that much fun, but we did our best to be chatty and not too disturbing whilst all of these symptoms manifested themselves, and to persuade her to drink the odd sip of water which, naturally, would trigger awful sounding coughing fits, but this was another night on which I'm convinced that mum was really more asleep than awake for the duration, and obsessing over her bedtime again.
Having satisfied myself that a doctor would be seeing her again tomorrow, and that I had flagged up my concerns to the staff, we drifted off into the night whilst being not exactly reassured that the particular nurse in question had seemed overly optimistic. Mind you, that attitude had been catching, because my own wasn't either, and, when I was reporting the day's events to my sister on the phone later, she too had come to the conclusion that mum was unlikely to be walking away from this episode.
But we shall see. In the meanwhile, the waiting game just continues, and the telephone sits by my bedside every night and we shall just have to see what happens...
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