Final Hospital Saga

It's been a long three weeks, but this hospital saga is finally coming to an end, barring some unforeseen development between now and tomorrow. Mom plans to come home then. Yesterday, however, her surgeon was still saying "If something comes up that makes sending her home seem unwise, I'll deny I ever suggested that she go home." He added that he would not dream of sending her home now if he did not know that she has a very strong support system to return to.

Today he came into Mom's room announcing that he's coming in with his bull whip today. "I used to be pretty good with the bullwhip. I had just a little one--about ten feet long. I liked to kill the flies on the side of the barn by flicking them with the whip." Then he looked at Mom, called her sweetheart, and said he wants her to walk all the way to the double doors near the hospital entrance. "None of this business of walking to the nurse's desk." The nurse told us later that he specified 300 yards walking distance.

"Have you taken a walk yet?" he asked at 10:30, just after she had gotten back into bed to rest up from having been "up" about 3 hours. "No? It's 10:30. If you're gonna walk three times today, you'd better get started."

Mom gave him a baleful look and said "I heard you." Then she got up again and pushed herself and her walker down past the first waiting room--about halfway to the double doors. She had lots of help with every step of the process, including one of the people at the nurse's station pushing her own desk chair into the hall for Mom to sit down on to rest for a bit. (The nurse had apparently not heard about the bullwhip.)

This reminded me of something Shane reported about Grandma when he and Dorcas stopped to see her on Black Friday. He noticed how much better Mom looked than she had the Wed. before when Shane and Dorcas had spent the night in the hospital while she was in ICU. "Her color was so much better, and she was eating well. But it was so funny when Murat [the PA] came in. He asked her if she's been coughing. She said no."

Handing her the heart-shaped red cushion she had been given to hold against her chest when she had to cough, Murat said, "I want you to cough for me."

As Shane said, "She gave him the hairy eyeball, thought about it a bit, then coughed one little cough." There were four or five other people in the room witnessing this little exchange.

Then Murat said, "Are you done with the pillow?"

"That depends."

"On what?"

"On what else you're going to make me do."

Murat assured her that he was done tormenting her and it was safe to give back the pillow.

We got very good news yesterday regarding Mom's staph infection. She doesn't have it after all! Here's the explanation for the false report. Last Saturday they had taken blood from her PICC line and from a site on the opposite arm. Then they cultured both samples, and the arm sample grew staph bacteria. The other one didn't. They said early on that this mixed result suggested that the one sample had surface contamination, and it might actually not be a systemic infection. However, her high white blood cell count suggested that it was systemic, so they treated it accordingly. They kept doing similar sampling and culturing each day, and none of the other samples ever produced any staph bacteria growth. So yesterday they stopped giving her antibiotics, concluding it had in fact been a surface contamination. The high white blood cell count is apparently not too uncommon after surgery, and they concluded that she was not in as much trouble as they thought.

Her blood sugar numbers are stabilizing nicely, and, with help, she is walking now to the bathroom. Today she is completely off oxygen. She is still getting Amiodoron, the arythmia medication, but I think all the other druggy-sounding things have been discontinued. She is mercifully not tethered to any lines. I haven't heard about the PICC line though. I presume that will come out before she leaves the hospital. It has saved her from lots of needle sticks, and been a very good thing overall.

Lowell and others picked up one of the electrically- adjustable hospital beds from Cedar Crest today and set it up in the living room where the sofa usually is. They rearranged the other furniture to allow Mom a place to rest in the bright, sunny area of the house, where she can be part of a conversation with visitors if she happens to be resting when they arrive. I think she will want to spend nights in her very own bed, but the bedroom is quite small and dark, and I think it could soon feel claustrophobic.

Linda arranged to have all the carpets and upholstered furniture professionally cleaned while Mom was gone (They look great!), and Marvin and Lois gave Mom an early Christmas present by having Bontrager Cabinets install pulls on all the kitchen cabinets (They had been installed without pulls when the house was new in the '90s.), plus putting pull-out shelves in the lower double-door cupboards, removing the center "post" to make the pullout shelves a possibility. These are changes Mom had wished for for years, but they had never worked their way to the top of the priority list for anyone till now. She probably didn't dream that anyone knew how to make that center post a non-issue. All it took was removing it and fastening it to the left-hand cupboard door so that it swings out with the door. Clever.

Marcus has been doing lots of cleaning and Linda has been sorting papers--the latter task being one we decided on Thanksgiving Day is the universal family nemesis. It's a good thing we have some unafflicted in-laws to help us out here. Is it because every piece of available reading material was so precious in our growing-up years? I don't know.

During some of the worst moments when Mom was in the hospital I wondered if she would live to see and enjoy the preparations we had made for her homecoming. I could not bear the thought for long, although it was clear to me even then that what I was thinking about was almost shamefully "nadihlich" (earthly) when compared to the eternal realities that are to be reckoned with in the face of death.

This time it looks like Mom is being spared, but some day she and we will die. The experience of the past few weeks has given us all a chance to come to terms with that certainty--not perfectly or completely to be sure, but it is a mercy from God to be able to work at this task one small step at a time.