It's A Nike Life

Mom is sick and in the hospital again. I was planning on posting about all kinds of things that have been happening in my life in the last few months-- going to Julie's baby shower, having five days with Matt and meeting all kinds of friends randomly in NYC, taking the intermediate care nursing class so that I can read strips and take patients on cardiac monitors, Melissa's upcoming wedding and my upcoming summer vacation, and lots of other stuff. But all of that seems stupid when family things come up. Like my mother, who had to go to the emergency department again yesterday morning.

My dad called up to me at 5:45am yesterday-- "Em? Are you awake yet? I'm taking mommy to the emergency room. She's been vomiting all night and she has a fever." I got ready for work and then stopped by the ED before reporting to my unit. Mom looked OK, just exhausted and dehydrated. She was getting some IV fluids and her temp hadn't gone above 100.8, but that was with Tylenol. I hung out for ten minutes and then left to get to the last of my ICRN classes.

At 12:30pm when the class was over, I went back to my unit to find that my mother had been admitted and was in a bed on the floor. Again, she seemed OK albeit a bit tired. So I left her and went to help the other nurses on the floor hang blood products, give meds, ambulate the patients, etc. My mother went downstairs for some diagnostic tests. Then all of a sudden the ultrasound department called and requested a nurse to come down-- mom wasn't feeling well, and she was shaking with fever and chills. They wanted to know if someone could come down with some Tylenol. I went downstairs armed with a thermometer to check her temp and some Tylenol in case the fever'd gone up totally unprepared for what I was about to see. When I got into the u/s room, there was my mom lieing on a stretcher shaking so badly she couldn't get any words out and screaming in pain from back spasms. I took her temperature-- 103.0 (!!), quickly gave her the pills, and assisted the u/s tech in bringing her back up to my unit. When we got her back to her room and back in bed I was beside myself-- she was delirious with fever, speaking nonsensically. I checked her temp again-- 104.4! Afraid she'd start having febrile seizures, I ran with another nurse to the pantry, prepared a shitload of ice packs as fast as we could, and packed them all over my mom. I started her back up on IV fluids and checked her temperature every ten minutes, ordering a cooling blanket to come up from the basement between tasks. Slowly, between the Tylenol, the ice packs and the cooling blanket, the fever began to come down-- 104.0, 103.9, 103.4, 102.7, 102.3 until she began sweating profusely and her temp was back in the 99's.

Holy shit-- I was so scared I'd been shaking. Fevers that high are horrible. I know babies get high temperatures like that and it's just awful, but I'd never known of an adult who wasn't intubated and on a ventilator in the ICU to have a temp above 104.

When she was a bit more stable, Elisha, my friend and the nurse assigned to my mother, administered some IV steroids and then some pretty hefty IV antibiotics. Apparently what had started out as a urinary tract infection had progressed to a much more complicated infection with systemic involvement. Phew. Nothing in my family is ever simple.

I'm a little bit calmer now knowing that the fever isn't critical, but she did spike again during the night into the 102's. She's also had some more diagnostic tests done-- renal scans, chest X-rays, blood and urine cultures, CT scans, arterial blood gases and has continued to get more IV antibiotics. And, just a little while ago, complaining of right-sided chest pains, they moved my mom to a cardiac monitored bed for observation.

Today is a day off for me. After the stress of yesterday afternoon (not just with my mother-- there was a narcotics discrepancy when I counted the narc box at the end of the shift and a livid health care proxy screaming at all the staff for allowing her completely with-it father to sign out of the hospital against medical advisement after he'd pulled out all of his tubes and refused any further treatments) and then sticking around to be with my mom until 9:30 at night I came home with a whopping headache. Actually, it was a migraine-- I'd taken meds for it while still in the hospital (which I NEVER do) so it wasn't as bad as it could have been. So after sleeping in a bit, I went downstairs, prepared food and packed a picnic for two for my dad to bring to my mom: whole wheat bread, oat bran and flax seed pitas, fresh egg salad, some leftover cold steak, lettuce, sliced tomatoes, grilled asparagus, and a blueberry and walnut muffin I'd baked a few days ago for dessert. The food, a couple bottles of water, some paper plates and napkins and real silverware all went into a big basket lined and covered with cloth towels and stuffed with ice packs. I've already made some stuff for dinner and plan on packing a similar basket this evening so that the three of us can have a picnic later on, too.

Hopefully the infection will begin to subside with all of the antibiotics she's getting, and hopefully she'll be able to come home again soon. Things like this seem to come up a lot in our family making me quite glad to be living very near a good hospital with a fantastic team of physicians on the transplant service. And we haven't said it in awhile (not since things with the boys were a bit more hectic), but this episode just goes to prove to me that it really is a Nike life for us.