(no subject)
I have another update on my grandma, this one not so good. Yesterday, my aunt and one of my grandma's oldest, closest friends were in her room at the nursing home visiting with her. My grandma was complaining of a headache that was behind her eye and at the back of her head, so the nurses there gave her some medicine to help. After 20 minutes it hadn't done anything, and my grandma's friend (who was also a nurse) said that my grandma's breathing was more shallow than she liked, so the nurses from the home came back in, and called the doctor to see what they should do. The doctor didn't answer, so they decided to just send her to the Cleveland Clinic. I'm not exactly sure what happened at the hospital exactly, but this is what I know: her heartrate was critically low (in the 30s, I believe), and her blood sugar was also low, but her blood pressure was fine. They gave her a paralytic agent, intubated her, sedated her, put her on a ventilator, and put pacing pads on her. My grandma has a living will that states that, if she has a terminal condition, to not give her any life-sustaining treatments, and if any had begun, to withdraw them and to allow her to die naturally with only things that would allow her to be comfortable in her last moments, so my aunt was told to go home and get the paperwork and call my family, pretty much so that we could come in to say goodbye. When we got there, after waiting for about 45 minutes, one of the doctors came out and told us what was going on. He then read the living will, and explained to us that, with the paralytic agent still in her system, taking the breathing tube out, and taking her off the ventilator would kill her, as her diaphram was paralyzed, so she breathe on her own. After that, he tried to see if we would agree to a temporary Pacemaker, but as that went against her living will, we wouldn't agree to that. A few hours after that, a neurologist came down and was talking to us, trying to push us into accepting the Pacemaker, even though we said repeatedly that we did not want one. He did get us to agree to allow the paralytic and sedative to wear off and my grandma to wake up and for us to ask her if she wanted a temporary Pacemaker put in. When we left last night at about midnight, she was off the ventilator and the pacing pads. the paralytic and the sedative had worn off, her heart rate was in the 50s, and she had not woken up. As far as I know, she's still alive, but that could change at any minute. The only thing that I do know is that my family and I went in last night to say goodbye, and now we're all in limbo, not knowing what's going to happen.
Okay, I just talked to my aunt, and the doctors want to meet with her and my parents at 3 today. I guess my grandma's kind of awake right now, not fully, but enough to shake her head and follow simple directions.