Setback Schmetback

On Wednesday, mom woke in a panic.  She has this annoying little toy that sits next to her bed and taunts her constantly.  It’s a little blue piece of rubber in which you insert your finger.  Then through a combination of space-age technology and generally just making stuff up, it displays your heart rate and your blood oxygen level.  When she woke on Wednesday that oxygen level showed 77%.  This is low – the closer to 100% the better – and it scared her.  She called dad, got put back onto oxygen, and got chest x-rayed.  For all this trouble, she was informed that she had pneumonia.  First, they were convinced that the pneumonia was in the part of her lung that was removed, but we’ll resolve that later.

When I got there Wednesday night, everyone was in sulking in Downersville.  For whatever reason, a one-day setback amidst several weeks of progress seemed like the apocalypse.  We all agreed that we would go back to our mantra from a few weeks ago and take this one day at a time.

On Thursday, during her occupational therapy, her day nurse Cindy came down to inform her that the physician’s assistant who had seen her recommended she go to the ER to get “an evaluation”.  We agreed, dad left work, a van picked her up, and we headed literally about a quarter mile down the road to St. Joseph’s something something Christian-y Hospital, which, by the way, is an outstanding facility.

In that three hour jaunt, we learned that mom has some diffuse pneumonia, does not have a blood clot anywhere the CT machine was pointed, and that the ER we saw was awesome.  She explained in very clear language that the pneumonia was something that needed to be dealt with, and that the antibiotics mom is now wolfing down should do the trick.  She even floated the possibility that the physician’s assistant was reading the x-ray incorrectly and didn’t realize the cloudy area in her top lung was the nebulous remnant of a lung that was no longer there. There is pneumonia, but “diffuse” just means that there is a little pneumonia in a lot of places, and not a big thick clump of germ-ridden gunk stuck somewhere.

The key to recovery is to breathe well, and once the pneumonia and attendant pain is gone, things should be back to normal.  Oh, and we made a PT breakthrough that day by learning that mom has no trouble riding in the passenger seat of her own car, except of course for needing to constantly badger the driver.

In the meantime, mom has resumed her usual routine.  The occupation and physical therapies are a little less strenuous, but are still happening.  They are monitoring her oxygen regularly, especially during therapy.  She has strict instructions to NOT monitor her oxygen constantly because she was absolutely obsessing over it for a while there.  She gets to check it when she is done with an activity or something.

In retrospect, Wednesday was less of a tsunami, and more like high tide.  Since then, everything wrong about the situation has improved.  The oxygen level is consistently higher, the pain is less, her sleep has been better, and her energy level is normal.  And to top that all off, the occupational therapist discovered this morning that the tube that feeds oxygen from the machine to the nose buds had a hole in it.  We have not ruled out sabotage by the cranky bitch across the hall.

Here are some pics from today.  Enjoy!

Dad picked out the flowers, and I did the arranging.  We're taking this act on the road.

Nice "Off-The-Shoulder Smolder"!

And finally here is me experimenting with the panoramic function on my camera.