Another Update

om is doing better; she was discharged a couple of days ago, and seems to be doing ok. We’ll see what happens when she starts regulating her own medications. Now that she is doing better and seems to be out of the woods, I guess I can return to life as normal:work, sleep, work, sleep, check email every four or five days, work, sleep.

I’m applying for a promotion at work. No real raise attatched, and it would be a lot more work, but it would mean a different shift. Possibly even a better shift for going back to school. I’m still trying to get together the tuition, so we’ll see if that comes together. But Brandon is so great. He basically said, see when your tuition is due and we’ll work the overtime to make it happen. What other guy in the world who has no material attatchment to a woman would actually work himself to the bone to allow her to go back to school? Now if only he would ask me to marry him 🙂 Or perhaps we might hear the pitter patter of little feet (and I don’t mean my cats).

All in due time, I suppose. Thank you for your good wishes this past week. My mother has certainly felt your prayers and good wishes at work in her life. Until my next update, blessed be and happy Commercially-marketed Holiday!

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Update on my mother…

For those of you who didn’t know already, today my mother was pronounced dead at 5:54am, they successfully brought her around after a full five minutes. She is in the ICU of Lewis Gale Medical Center in Salem, VA and only my dad, myself, her mother, and father are allowed to see her. They are restricting her visits to four half-hour blocks spaced throughout the day, so the chances that I have to spend with her I am grabbing right now.

The neurologist she has told us that basically, she had run out of one of her psychiatric meds and her brain told her body to shut down, and it did. That is the only explaination they have come up with for what happened this morning. This morning my father came in after plowing the roads (a service his company does for the city each winter) to refill his coffee mug. My mother was talking to him, making about as much sense as she normally does, and then she just hit the floor. Mid-sentence. My father tried to do CPR, carried her into the truck and drove her to Lewis Gale. Our hill was so icy the ambulance couldn’t get up it. He had called them on the way and they were waiting to admit her. Things were pretty bad.

She still hadn’t woken up by 3pm and the doctors advised my dad to make out a will for her. They originally thought that maybe she had forgotten that she had already taken her meds and accidentally overdosed, but after counting the pills, the only pill count that wasn’t coming out correctly was the medication she had run out of days ago. She was waiting for it to come in the mail, as she has a hard time leaving the house to go to the drug store because of the agorophobia. By 8pm, her mother and father and my dad were all there and they said she was doing a little better. Still not so coherent, but she was awake. This was about the time I got a message from security at my work saying “Emergency: call your dad or aunt. Your mother is in ICU.” I am relieved to say that both my immediate superior and my manager were very understanding. They let Brandon go as well to be there to support me. Given the new strict attendance policy, I feel very grateful that they bent the rules so I could have a support system with me. I honestly don’t know if I would have been ok on the way home if it hadn’t been for Brandon.

I get to see her from 10-10:30am tomorrow, again from 1-1:30, 4-4:30 and 8-8:30pm. She however gets to have a grand day. A battery of tests, MRI, cat-scan, cardiology work-up, and a visit from the OBGYN. Apparantly when your brain “resets” itself (the only way the neurologist could describe it) anything can happen. Right now, my mother who has been in menopause for years, has the blood work of a pregnant woman. Unless the child would be an immaculate conception, that wouldn’t be possible; but she is also producing hormone levels of girls in adolecence. It makes no sense to me, but I just have to keep listening to the list after list of improbabilities that the doctors keep rattling off about my mom.

However you choose to pray, I would greatly appreciate the prayers for my mother. I know she and I have had our differences, and in her recent mental state she’s not the mother I knew growing up, but she is still my mother. I love her dearly, and do not know how I will bear it if I don’t have her around to talk to, laugh with, or love.

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