When it rains, it pours…

When it rains, it pours… pours the sweet cleansing healing rains that is 🙂

Again this will be a double day post.  I really feeling like going to sleep right now, but I don’t want to have to do a three day post, so here goes.  I have a feeling this will be a very long post as well, so buckle up and enjoy the ride (oh and keep your hands inside and remain seated until this ride comes to a complete stop!)

Yesterday started off a little rocky.  I woke up around 8 am and found that my mother was already up and dressed.  Come to find out that she didn’t even sleep.  Apparently she was having panic attacks all night.  She said that she took a diazepam around 9 pm the night before and then took another one just a little while before I got up.  I was very confused by this.  This brought up two issues for me.  First, how in the heck could she have two diazepam in less than 12 hours and still be walking.  It didn’t make sense to me.  Second, she obviously had been rummaging around through her medications, which scares me that I don’t know what she might have taken, but more on that in just a bit.  We talked for a little bit about why she was so anxious and I realized just how afraid of the CT scan, that was scheduled for 11:15 am, she was.  I still am not quite sure why she was anxious about it because she could not verbalize it.  So either she was afraid of the results or something about the procedure itself had her worried.  Our discussion was interrupted when dad called to see how she was doing.  They talked for a little while and when I went to check on her, I found that she really must have taken the diazepam because she was slumped over and the phone was pretty close to slipping out of her hands.  I used some sly maneuvers (something I am having to get good at) and told her I wanted to talk with dad.  When she handed me the phone, I asked her to go sit down on the couch.  I explained to dad, who was a little puzzled why she started acting weird, that she had taken a diazepam.  He said, “Good, she needs it.”  Though I was thinking that it wasn’t so good that she needed it and started to think that maybe dad wasn’t helping with her anxiety.

I got off the phone with dad and mom was out.  This is not what I wanted.  She still needed to finish off the second dose of barium contrast for the CT scan and I needed to get her ready to leave in a while.  I didn’t have much choice but to wake her up and coax her into drinking the contrast.  I kept telling her she just had one more swallow until I she finally got it all down and then I went to get ready.  I also planned how I was going to get this lump to the medical office for the scan.  Fortunately the diazepam didn’t last very long and after an hour of sleeping she was waking up and coming around in time to leave.  By the time we got to the appointment (which was later than scheduled because they had to direct us to another location when the CT scanner at the office we were supposed to visit decided to break down) she was pretty much alert and didn’t have too much trouble walking.  We got the scan done and headed over to the hospital for a quick visit with dad, then headed home where mom could take a nap and I could rest as well.

So about her getting into the medications, I will need to figure something out.  This is one of those areas where I need to be delicate and respect how mom processes information and how she will react to changes.  I am afraid that she will get into some trouble taking the wrong medications or me double dosing her if I don’t know she has already taken something.  The bottom line is that I don’t want her getting her pills by herself.  However, things will get ugly if I just hide them away and tell her she need to ask me for them.  So I started making a change by explaining to her that if she gets medication herself, she needs to let me know so that I can make sure she doesn’t take the wrong thing and so I know what she has taken if she asks me about them later.  You may be thinking to yourself, what if she reads this post.  Fortunately for me, she will forget she read it.  That is the crux of the problem.  Her short term memory is horrible right now.  So every day we go through a process where I explain the different between her oxycontin and her vicodin.  Sometimes she just goes with it and sometimes she will argue with me for a bit about the difference.  In any case, it is because of this daily reminder of her memory problems that I don’t want her messing around with her pills.  She is sensitive about being treated like a child.  I need to protect her in a way that does not completely remove her independence or her dignity.  For the time being, the pills will stay where they are and I will just have to keep a closer eye on what she is doing when she gets around them.

My sister got here last night and was witness to one of the daily explanation with mom about her pain pills.  Mom asked me for one of her flying pills (that is what she calls diazepam because originally the doctor prescribed those to her to help relax her when they had to fly somewhere).  I got her pill and asked her why she was so anxious.  I mean the CT scan was all over with, so I wasn’t sure what would have her wound up.  She said that she wasn’t anxious and that her mid section was uncomfortable.  “Oh, you need a pain pill then”, I said.  She started to get upset and tell me that is why she asked for her flying pill.  I explained that the flying pill was not her vicodin and that I would get her vicodin for the pain.  As usually, I get the pill bottles so she can see the different bottles (which look different and are different sizes) while I explain the difference between the kinds of pills she has.  Unfortunately she wasn’t getting it, so my sister tried to help.  At least my sister could see what I go through so that I didn’t feel like I was loosing my mind too.  We got it all settled in the end and she was happy again.

This morning we had to get to the oncology office at 8:45 am for her third chemotherapy treatment.  Dad called and was quite upset because he know that this was an important day.  We would find out the result of the CT and find out if chemo would be done or if they would stop treatments.  He said that he didn’t really sleep last night.  I told him that he should have asked the nurse for something to relax him so that he could sleep and not stay up all night worrying as that would have a negative effect on his recovery.  I told him that my sister would be there within the hour and that he should try to relax and not worry so much.  That there wasn’t anything he could do to change whatever the results would be anyway.  It was raining this morning so traffic was a nightmare and we ended up getting to the appointment about 15 minutes late, but that was okay because once we got there we heard the good news.  Mom’s CT showed a reduction in the cancer, primarily in her liver.  There was no new cancer in her chest, abdomen or pelvis and there was only a couple millimeter growth in the tumor in her right lung.  They said it was so small that we should not worry or focus on that portion, but that the reduction in size (several centimeters) in her liver tumors was the real news to focus on.  They asked, given this news, if mom wanted to go forward with chemo and she said, “Of course, lets do it.”  She was so happy and couldn’t wait to tell dad the good news.

Now, I had been dreading this chemo session because of how poorly the last one went.  It took six days for mom to recover from the last one and during those six days we had an overnight hospital stay and the rest of the time it was zombie mom.  I really did not want to have to go through that again.  It was very difficult seeing my mother in that very weird state for so many days.  So I was watching her throughout the chemo treatment and kept waiting for zombie mom to appear, but to my excitement there was no zombie mom in sight.  She went through chemo without any problems.  The only side effect was the benedryl made her very chatty and she slurred just a tad.  It was a little bit annoying trying to keep on track with her thought process as she chatted away, but I will take that over zombie mom any day.  The last time she had chemo she slept for 8 hour straight when she got home.  It is now 10 pm and she is still going.  I have actually asked her a couple times to go sit down and rest for a while, but she flat out said no and that she had things to do.  I don’t know for sure what the difference is between this chemo treatment and the last one, but there are a couple things that could be contributing to this.  One is that she got really good news and that put her in a very good mood.  Another could be that she has stated she has been to sedentary and negative and she needed to change that.  She wasn’t going to be waited on hand a foot and wasn’t going to be filled with negative thoughts.  It also helps that dad has been doing better the past two days as well.  This new, more energetic mom is definitely nice, but her being on the go more means that I too have to be on the go and watching her more.  I was getting used to waiting for her to take and nap and then catching a couple Z’s myself.

As I just mentioned, dad has been doing quite well the past two days.  My sister being here today helped a lot because it kept him busy and he didn’t have as much time to be in his head.  He has been so wrapped up in negative and hateful emotions that he hasn’t done anything to focus on getting better.  However, the past two days he has been on low flow oxygen and he has been following through with the physical therapy.  He is looking better and wasn’t quite as weepy today has he has been in the recent past.  He also had more solid food today than he has had in the past week, which is good because he needed to exercise the swallower just as much as the rest of his muscles.  I think we might actually be on the road to bringing him home in the next couple weeks.  He just needs to be able to keep his oxygen saturation above 90% while on 10 lpm or less of oxygen and under physical exertion.  Once he can do that, he can come home.  It is going to take more than just building up his muscles though.  He is going to have to get into a better frame of mind.  No more of this pity party. No more of this competition to beat mom to the grave. If he can keep positive then he will improve much more quickly.  The doctors and nurses have been pleased with his progress and the only medicine he is on now is steroids to keep the swelling down in his lungs and make it easier to breathe.

Gah, I am getting so sleepy now that I am afraid my words are going to stop making sense (if they ever did).  So I suppose I should end this post, go to sleep and hope that when I wake up mom and dad are still well.

Well I think that sums up the day.  We shall see what fun stuff tomorrow brings!