..For Anything Save the World..

 At this point in my life however my mother is the world and the world saw fit to redirect my most recent activities, so I missed a Correll post.. a sadly important one.   I missed many posts this past week so today I've played catch up.   As usual OS is the spectrum ; birthdays, love, poetry, photography, politics, angst, open calls, memories, messages, the lost and the found.   In reality, though it shook the foundations of my personal corner of the world, this past week has been a mere blip on Life's radar screen.   Eight days of stuff much like sound bytes, many of those bytes pushing my tolerance of everything from the medical field to family to the very edge.   But just a blip all the same.

As many of you know I am my disabled mother's primary caregiver.   I had no intentions of writing this post, other than perhaps a bit of an apology for my neglect of those I read and comment to frequently.   But then I read the Correll post that I missed.   A line in that post struck a chord with this past week of experience.   He began the post I missed with "Today four mild doctors on the Upright East Side, four Mosi from Mt. Sinai, tell me it's Parkinson's." but that isn't the line.   He followed that with "No.   It's not."   That's the line I'm talking about.   I understand the thrust of Greg's post, the business of 'it', the Parkinson's, and if you haven't read the post, like Greg or not, please do.   Elegant and succinct and damning in it's clarity toward what might be called a death sentence, the forced realization of what the end of your personal world will likely be.   Not quite as definitive as being given the date it will happen, the day you'll die, but the end result is so similar as to render any differences unnoticable.  

It's a worthy read.

But that line "No.   It's not.".. for one moment I understood a different meaning.   "Your mother has had a stroke." becomes "No.   It's not." as though the diagnosis might be wrong.   Because the doctors themselves were confused by what she presented them with gives me the luxury of saying to myself "No.   It's not."   Perhaps it was, all of the outward signs were there.   Perhaps it wasn't, none of the technical signs were difinitive.   CTs, MRIs, the battery of questions asked, physical tests.   Confusion all around.   She woke a week ago Tuesday morning with aphasia, weakness on the right side and a general deterioration of motor skills.   Stroke was my first thought, stroke was the thought of the emergency room doctor on call, stroke was the condition the specialists at the stroke center at the university hospital she was sent to expected to see and treat.   Then the test results began coming back and things got muddy.   There were 'indications' of a possible tiny stroke (the doctor's words) in one area of the brain but somehow this didn't correspond with the effects she was showing, that would have come from a stroke in another part of the brain.   Her blood pressure had sky rocketed during the 'event'.. but there was no indication that her blood pressure was a cause.   Seizures, again possible indications of small ones, but nothing allowing them to say such was the cause of the 'event'.   The only difinitive thing to come of all of this was the surety that she did have a urinary tract infection.   So that was posited as a possible cause.   I have it on authority of a cousin (home health worker) and a brother (medical training and work in a nursing facility) that yes, such infections can cause such physical signs in the elderly, they had seen it.  

Greg's 'it', and my mother isn't an 'it' either.

Oh, and she has a broken bone, an old break just below the head of the femur - not the cause of this 'event', just an unexpected discovery.   The car accident in '04 perhaps, after all 'they' missed the crushed foot bones in the xrays then too.   Gotta love technology, medical and otherwise.

So a stroke, maybe yes, maybe no.   Moot of course.   It happened, it's over - for now at least - and life carries on.   Just to be safe she now takes two blood pressure medications, a blood thinner and 81 mils of aspirin, the course of antibiotics for the UTI is finished and we're watching her diet.   Although that really hasn't changed much ; she has reached 86 years with what she eats, drinks (and yes she smokes - maybe a pack a week) so she couldn't have been doing all that much wrong to start with.   No one has yet said "It was a stroke." or "It was seizures." or even "It was the UTI."   We're pretty much left with "It was an 'event'."   The weakness on the right side has gone, her motor skills are once more up to par and she's no longer speaking that odd foreign language.   Did I mention that it was a university hospital?   A teaching hospital.   You know those doctor programs on television with scads of doctors and student practitioners going from room to room assessing cases and treatments?   They really do that.   No fewer than seven and sometimes as many as ten attending her bedside at least once a day, a mix of actual licensed doctors and student practitioners.   Sometimes the doctors spoke, sometimes the students conducted the 'inquisitions' and physical tests.   "What's your name?"   "Where are you?"   "Who's the president?"   "Can you squeeze my hand?"   "Raise your right leg."   A piece of paper and pen "Can you write something for us?"   Over and over and over.. once a day in the morning like clockwork.   In her eyes this expression, her thoughts after the first three days were easy to read.. "Why do you keep asking me the same questions that I've already answered for you?"   I'll agree, surely they could have varied the routine just a little.   Only on the day of admission and two days later with a small set back did she fail her tests.

The set back wasn't physical, it was the aphasia.   Aphasia from Wiki.   In Mom's case it was speaking another language.   Not a language 'problem', nothing garbled, no stumbling, forgetting of words, or misplacing them.   It was literally as though she were speaking another language, like watching someone converse in French or Spanish.   I had never seen anything like it and apparently the doctors hadn't either, they recorded her doing this with great interest and some excitement.. so, now it's 'my mother the teaching tool'.   A bit of a silver lining I suppose that is, that others will actually see this thing now.   Perhaps others have, perhaps it was just this hospital and these doctors who haven't.

Glancing through the door into the living room this moment, where she sits in her recliner, if not for the very vivid memories it might never have happened.   The 'event'.   But I wonder..

In the emergency room at the local hospital there was a question as to when the 'event' actually began.   Because she went to sleep between 2 and 3 AM and awoke at 5:30 already 'there' and it was between 6 and 7 when the doctor thought to ask, it was decided that they'd not administer whatever the treatment is given to stroke victims within the first five hours to reverse the stroke's damaging effects (I'm told).   Without a firm diagnosis of stroke I wonder.. would the treatment have been more damaging if it had been administered and it wasn't a stroke?   Maybe not, he would have done if the timing had been more certain, and surely he'd not have been ready to if a stroke was actually in question, making the 'cure' worse than the 'illness'.   Moot.   Greg's "No.   It's not." made me think of the falability of those in the medical field.   They learn from books, experiment and experience.. and if you're the first experience, not in the books there will have been no experiment yet, making it as much of a crap shoot for the professional as it is for the lay-person.   I think anyway.  

Sometimes the answers to be had aren't answers at all.

But there you have it, the post I didn't intend to write in just this way, but did because I missed a Correll post in which he said..

"No.   It's not."