The Grandma Update
So yeah the twitter feeds are probably a little confusing, so here we go:
11am on Friday my mom called sobbing, told me to come to the hospital NOW because they were saying Grandma (who I am VERY close to) has hours to live. I got down there as soon as I could. She'd had a bad fall and broke her pelvis a few weeks ago and hadn't been doing well since. She has a disorder that causes her glands not to maintain her sodium levels the way they should, this has been ongoing, but she had a drastic drop in her sodium levels. She'd been unable to keep food down and was managing somehow to retain water and be horribly dehydrated at the same time. It was a bad, bad situation. She was in pain through the morphine and the doctor was giving my parents the 'quality of life' speech and the nursing staff told us the next step from here is hospice (even BEFORE the crisis was over and they honestly knew what was up) and just keeping her drugged up and out of pain. I knew something else was wrong with the way she was grabbing her side at about the rib level over and over, he pain wasn't in her hips where it should have been if the diagnosis that her osteoporosis was just too bad and her hips weren't going to recover from it.
We finally talked to the doctor as a family Friday night and told him what we were seeing and what we've known to be happening for the last 2 weeks. He said he'd see about an xray the next day on her ribs. When he came in on Saturday he didn't order an xray, he ordered a CT scan, I think things had started to come together in his head after he talked to us. After the CT scan the doctor took one look and had the surgeon on the phone and and was getting grandma's stomach pumped so they could do surgery NOW. They thought it was a bad infection in her gallbladder, when they opened her up, they found that the blood supply to her gallbladder had been pinched off and the gallbladder had died. This would easily cause the vomiting and intestinal distress as well as the raging pain at lower rib area on that side.
So that seems to have been the root of her issues. They have her sedated because she kept trying to get up and leave after her surgery, the pain killers make her REALLY loopy. Her sodium levels are better but still low, but not so low that her heart rate is slowed anymore which is good. We won't really know for a few days how she'll be after all this. It's possible that without the saline drip, she won't be able to maintain her sodium levels and it will be a matter of days or months. But she might come out just fine, minus a gallbladder and plus a 5 inch scar.
Now we wait and hope.
11am on Friday my mom called sobbing, told me to come to the hospital NOW because they were saying Grandma (who I am VERY close to) has hours to live. I got down there as soon as I could. She'd had a bad fall and broke her pelvis a few weeks ago and hadn't been doing well since. She has a disorder that causes her glands not to maintain her sodium levels the way they should, this has been ongoing, but she had a drastic drop in her sodium levels. She'd been unable to keep food down and was managing somehow to retain water and be horribly dehydrated at the same time. It was a bad, bad situation. She was in pain through the morphine and the doctor was giving my parents the 'quality of life' speech and the nursing staff told us the next step from here is hospice (even BEFORE the crisis was over and they honestly knew what was up) and just keeping her drugged up and out of pain. I knew something else was wrong with the way she was grabbing her side at about the rib level over and over, he pain wasn't in her hips where it should have been if the diagnosis that her osteoporosis was just too bad and her hips weren't going to recover from it.
We finally talked to the doctor as a family Friday night and told him what we were seeing and what we've known to be happening for the last 2 weeks. He said he'd see about an xray the next day on her ribs. When he came in on Saturday he didn't order an xray, he ordered a CT scan, I think things had started to come together in his head after he talked to us. After the CT scan the doctor took one look and had the surgeon on the phone and and was getting grandma's stomach pumped so they could do surgery NOW. They thought it was a bad infection in her gallbladder, when they opened her up, they found that the blood supply to her gallbladder had been pinched off and the gallbladder had died. This would easily cause the vomiting and intestinal distress as well as the raging pain at lower rib area on that side.
So that seems to have been the root of her issues. They have her sedated because she kept trying to get up and leave after her surgery, the pain killers make her REALLY loopy. Her sodium levels are better but still low, but not so low that her heart rate is slowed anymore which is good. We won't really know for a few days how she'll be after all this. It's possible that without the saline drip, she won't be able to maintain her sodium levels and it will be a matter of days or months. But she might come out just fine, minus a gallbladder and plus a 5 inch scar.
Now we wait and hope.