Ups and downs

God what an emotional roller coaster this weekend has been.

Friday after staying awake longer than I would have liked to to see our carpet installed, I managed to collapse and get almost 6 hours of sleep. Then we all went up to see grandma in the hospital where we were assaulted by bad news.

Her fever was back. She was delirious, thinking that she was at home and needed to go to the hospital. It was scary. Not only that, but they'd moved her from the far end of the hall, to the room across the hall from the nurse's station and had a bed monitor on because she had this habit of getting out of bed with no one there to help her, and she was pretty darn weak, plus had a tangle of IV's to deal with. It was a scary sight. When we left, they were prepping her for another CT scan.

And the results weren't good. Her abscess was back, and bigger than before. And the nursing staff was having issues maintaining an IV site, so her alarm was going off all day on the IV pumps and her IV was leaking, so they decided that she needed a PICC line as well, so that they could stop blowing her veins with 2 different IVs.

So yesterday my dad and aunts spent all day waiting to see her doctor, who forgot about her after getting tied up in the emergency room and didn't remember until he was on his way home about her. So he called up at night.

At least yesterday she looked better. She was remembering a bit more and remembering some of what was going on. It seemed like our scare of possibly losing her was over. My mom and I had talked that morning and cried. It's so hard to face our mortality, but I realize that if the time comes, Grandma s ready. She's at peace and she misses Grandpa so much. It'll be hard when the time comes, but I don't think that it's going to be now.

It'll come soon enough if she doesn't start eating soon. We found out over the phone from Dr Ali last night that she's only eating half as much as she needs to survive. We asked the nurses if we could bring her up food since they were doing a calorie count, and they said yes, as long as we told them what we fed her.

So a plan strung into action. We were going to take her the chocolate ice cream that she loved so much from Mussell Beach, and we'd get her a large and tell her that it was a small. She also said to bring her chocolates if we wanted her to eat. So we went this morning after church and got her a bunch of candy: chocolate covered cashew clusters, chocolate covered caramels, and peanut butter kisses. Then we went over to Mandarin House and got 4 orders of takeout Chinese, Sweet and sour shrimp for her, and mom, dad and I got our favorites and took it all up to the hospital, hoping to entice grandma to eat. Unfortunately we got there after her lunch tray was delivered, but it had a piece of rubbery chicken on it, so she swapped out a crab rangoon for the chicken and munched on some of the shrimp. Aunt DeeDee took the leftovers home and heated them up for grandma to eat again later. She nibbled at the shrimp and the rice and ate the other rangoon for dinner and then ate her mashed potatoes and green beans off of her tray, so it was ok, if still not enough.

Until we convinced her to eat a "small" ice cream cone tonight. When we got up there tonight, her PICC line was in, and the plan for her is to get drained again tomorrow and have another drain put into the abscess while she completes 2 week of antibiotics and rehab over at Bay Special Care hospital at Bay Med's West Campus.

She's not out of the woods yet, but things are looking up.