Week Four - All Downhill From Here - Our Biggest Mistake of All Made Painfully Obvious

Mom, after having put together this timeline, I can now see that it was week four after your stroke that you really started to go downhill. I already mentioned that it was on Day 22 that it was obvious to me that you may have reached your plateau. God did I ever hate admitting this! Day 24 was a Sunday, and it was not a good day at all. Day 25 you barely opened your eyes all day. On Day 25 you seemed better. You were even alert during Morning Joe. During these days I spent all morning from you from 5:00 AM to about 10:30 AM. Then Paul would come, and he'd stay with you. Paul told me that you were in a wheel chair for three hours that day. Little did I know at that time that that would be the 3rd from the last time that you would be in a wheel chair.
  On Day 27 the Doctor from the nursing home came to see you at 6:00 in the morning. It was strange, I thought, that this huge nursing home only had one doctor, and he was only there two times a week, and usually he was only there a few hours on those two days. But I was grateful that he spent thirty minutes with you. But overall, the day was not a good day for you, and you did not eat much, as usual.
  Day 28 was the end of Week Four, and it was the end of your stay at the Nursing Home. (You had been admitted on Day 7, so your total days in the Home or Rehab Center was 21 days). I remember feeling so positive that this was the day you were going to see Dr. Wang. He had not had a chance to see you since your stroke, so this would be the first time. I was anxious to see how your temperament would change because I knew you really loved Dr. Wang. That appointment was for 3:00. When Transcare came with the van, we hunted around for a wheelchair. The one in your room was way too wide, but after 20 minutes of searching, someone finally found a wheel chair more appropriate. That would be the second to the last time that you would ever sit in a wheel chair again. Of course I did not know this at the time.
  At the time I was afraid that sitting would be painful for you, but I will never forget this day. I will never forget it because you were totally out of it. I had never seen you so listless. You could barely stay awake. While the Transcare man strapped you down in the back of the van, you seemed oblivious to everything that was going on. Normally you would be trying to ask questions, but not this time. Even when he gave you a blanket to keep you warm, the blanket would fall down because you were unable to hold it up. As we drove to see the doctor, during that whole 30 minutes you were sleeping in the chair. Well, I thought, that was better than being in pain.
  When I wheeled you into see the doctor, I was so grateful that the nurse was so nice to you. You did wake up, and we did try to get you to stand up on their scale, but even with the two of us, we could not do it. I had desperately wanted to know how much weight you lost after eating only about 100 or 200 calories a day for the last four weeks. But I will never know. You were sleeping even while the nurse was taking your blood pressure. When Dr Wang came in, you were still sleeping. You would wake up for brief moments when the doctor addressed you directly, and there was a flicker of recognition, but this was *not* the reunion I was expecting between doctor and patient. The doctor spent about 40 minutes with you. Mostly he was talking to me, and most of the conversation I have forgotten, but i do remember that i was seeking his advice on what to do next, because your time limit had been reached at the nursing home, and you would be coming home tomorrow -- or so I thought.
  Dr. Wang was the first person who mentioned Hospice Care. He did not want to tell me that you were dying, but I could tell that he figured you did not have much many more days on this earth alive. So I sorrowfully wheeled you back to the lobby and waited for Transcare to return. They came back quickly, and we brought you back to the nursing home. But that is when I was told that your last blood tests had come back abnormal, and that you would have to go to the hospital! They asked me which hospital I would like you to go to, and I suggested Memorial Hermann Southwest, because that is where Dr. Wang could see you, and that is where your Cardiologist could see you, and that is also where your best friend, Marian could see you. Marian, a 93 year old lady herself, lived in an assisted apartment just next door to the hospital.
  And that is how Week Five of your life started: with hospital stays and a hard fight for your survival. Your blood pressure was dangerously low. They almost took you to ICU that night, but the blood pressure came back up after running some IV's. The main thing wrong was toxic levels of Dixogin. This was one of the medications that you were getting at the nursing home -- one of the medications that you objected strongly to almost every day. Had I known how harmful all these medications would be on a nearly empty stomach, I would have insisted that they stop. You knew better than all of us. You tried not to take them, but nearly everyone involved in your care was making you take these senseless drugs. I am so sorry, Mom! This was perhaps our biggest mistake of all. Making you take drugs even while you were hardly drinking. I don't think you were drinking more than two small cups of water a day.
  But if I learned anything through this ordeal, it was that your HEART was plenty strong. As you know, you had a pacemaker installed in 2004. That is when I came to live with you. I always questioned whether you really needed that pacemaker. In my mind it was the cause of most of your ailments that would follow. But I am no doctor. It was just intuition. Your heart attack in 2004 was, after all, very minor. You didn't even know you had one. These last six weeks of your life proved to me your heart was strong. It was not your heart that ever gave out -- and there were plenty of opportunities for that to happen during very traumatic times, such as lifts into ambulance gurnies, and painful pokes to get blood, and hours and hours of getting your blood pressure readings, and painful diaper and sheet changes, and not two but three operations in your stomach. (I will get to those in more detail future entries)