Mom’s Status: 2010-08-22
Summary
She’s even more active and happy today. Her leg swelling is reduced, and she spent significant time reading the paper; though she’s not quite ready to work the crossword puzzles yet. She sat up longer today than at any other time during this hospital stay. Over all: She’s improved markedly once again today. Keep it up, Mom!
Pending Objectives
- Monitor Mom’s overall pain status. We’re looking to get her pain stopped.
- Track the dissipation of Mom’s pelvic hematoma.
Completed Objectives
- 2010-08-16: Find out if that “flapping object” was present in Mom’s heart in her 2008 echo cardiograms. DONE. It was not present. This is a new development since 2008.
- 2010-08-16: Get council on results of the 2010-08-13 mid section CT scan and arterial doppler study. DONE. Mom’s bleeding has lessened. They plan on doing another CT scan tomorrow to check progress.
- 2010-08-17: Establish physical therapy for Mom; per her cardiologist’s recommendation. DONE. She should have her first session either today or tomorrow.
- 2010-08-18: Seek counsel on results of the 2010-08-17 (yesterday’s) mid section CT scan; once it’s done. DONE. This test revealed a hematoma. See details about this elsewhere in this document.
- 2010-08-20: Find out what the liver doctors think of the spot on Mom’s liver. DONE. Her liver is okay; no obvious recent deterioration.
Log
11:45 AM: Leaving for the hospital.
- I arrived. Mom’s sitting up in her new ”stretch chair” and reading the newspaper.
- The swelling in her legs is down since they restarted her Lasix yesterday. She still has a lot of fluid weight to get rid of. But it’s encouraging to see her well on the way. Her eating more and getting up and about should help this too.
- Interesting tid bit: Low protein in diet can trigger swelling. So we’re encouraging her to eat more meat.
- Her favorite cardiologist came in this morning before I arrived. But sister Jojo filled me in on what he had to say.
- Nothing much different really from the past few days. He wants her to eat more, and how they proceed will be driven by what shows up in tomorrow’s heart pictures test.
- The palliative care people also visited and were impressed at how much better Mom feels.
- 01:00 PM: Then, sister Jojo and I walked to Panara Bread for lunch.
- 02:15 PM: We returned and Mom was still sitting in the chair and dozing. But she awoke immediately upon seeing us come in.
- 03:00 PM: After chatting a bit more, we decided to head out. Mom’s ready to go to sleep again. I’ll head in sometime after she returns from her echo test tomorrow.