Unexpected travels

I spent last weekend in southern California, visiting my mother in the hospital. She's still there, and will probably be there for a few more days, but I am back home and going through the usual routines, while I wait to hear how she's doing. It's the waiting, 500 miles away, that is most difficult.

Mom has so many things going on with her, there's no short or simple way to explain why she's in the hospital. Her heart works at about 33%, but that's been the case for 7 years since her bypass surgery. Her kidney function is around 26%, but that's been true for about 2 years. As long as she stayed active - which she did, walking and swimming daily - and as long as she watched her diet, she was fine. A little slow-moving, but trim and happy and for the most part, really fine. What has brought her low is very minor surgery she had at the end of December for a squamous cell on her lower leg which has become a horrible, enormous wound that is excruciatingly painful. I'm told it looks and acts just like a diabetic ulcer (which may well never heal), with the exception that she can feel it, while a diabetic person might not. So she stopped being able to get around, and she was on pain meds that didn't exactly work, and she was too intimated by the pain to care for the wound correctly to begin with, and she had no appetite and didn't eat, and lost 10 pounds that she could ill afford to lose. Then she had another infection they had to locate, and blood loss they had to figure out, and the morphine they put her on for the pain and the 2 pints of blood they gave her helped, but not enough, etc. etc.

Her nurses have been excellent, as have most of the team of doctors (cardiology, nephrologist, wound care specialist, hospital drs). Yesterday, she was transferred to ICU for the first time because she had a cardiac "incident" - either a heart attack, or a response to all the meds she's been on, but she seems better in ICU than she did before. (She has been allowed to eat again, and snuck an "illegal" cell phone call to me from her bed.)

I'm glad I went to visit her, and I hope to go again soon, possibly with R., who really wants to see her. But it's a day-by-day, hour-by-hour wait, now, to see what happens next. This is hard for me, and harder for my sister, who, as primary care giver living near my mom has had to put her life, and the new career she's trying to start, on the back burner while she spends as much of her day as she can with Mom or making arrangements for what happens once she's out of the hospital.

As always, there is so much more to say here, so much more to write (which has always been my best tool for "processing" things), but limited time in which to compose.

So that's all the news, for now.