I haven’t read LJ in over a week, so if anyone has posted something I need to know about, let me know.

What’s been going on?

The first part of the week was just mundane busyness, but Tuesday night Mom wound up in the emergency room again. Fortunately, she was home again the next day, but things have been busy since. I haven’t been back to work since Tuesday, taking her to various doctors and clinic appointments, but I will be going back to work tomorrow. Mom’s doing really well again. This morning she decided to vacuum the house. Try stopping her when she’s got a notion to do something…

So what happened?

She got sick over the weekend with (from all appearances) the same crud I had last week, but what sent her to the ER was essentially a mix up in her medications for blood pressure. Her BP crashed precipitously (68/42). It stabilized fairly quickly, fortunately, and she was in pretty good spirits by Wednesday. Exhausted, you know, because being in the hospital does tend to be an experience, but her BP has been more normal since.

In the ER room, the guy in the bed next to hers went into full cardiac arrest. Crash carts, paddles, the entire thing as seen on TV. Terrifying. He was stabilized by the time she was moved into a room in the hospital for overnight observation. God bless him. He was a young guy. Hope he is/he’ll be okay.

But Mom…she didn’t call me or her doctor when she started to have BP issues because she didn’t want to bother anyone, being a very independent lady, so no one knew it had crashed until I came home from work Tuesday night. She got a nice but stern lecture from her doctor: “Let me be the one to decide if you’re bugging me. I’d rather deal with this in the middle of the day when we can avoid a trip to the emergency room. Otherwise, I might get really sulky.” He’s a good guy. I like him a lot. He told me, “I don’t want your mother’s dialysis experience to become a series of misadventures like this.” Something we can all agree on. I think Mom took his lecture seriously this time.

Once she has the peritoneal dialysis machine at home (hopefully, Monday or Tuesday) she will have to make fewer trips to the dialysis center for training/monitoring and we’re hoping we can settle into a new normal that will be less exhausting for everyone. She’ll be able to do her treatment overnight as she sleeps rather than four times a day and she will only have to go into the dialysis center for monthly check ins/check ups. For the last 4-6 weeks she’s been going 2-3 times a week on top of other appointments, and that’s just too much time on the road for her. So, I think that’s been contributing to everything.

Onward. Love holds you hostage every minute of every day, but I wouldn’t want to live without it.

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