Quick update on G'ma Nordell before I head to work....
The last couple of days have been rough ones filled with hurry up and wait.
We received a call yesterday morning at 1:30AM to tell us G'ma had an episode where her blood pressure dropped WAY TOO LOW; she became unresponsive and nurse could not detect a pulse for about a minute. The nurse "opened up" the blood transfusion and she perked up after that. The call was to not only inform us of this incident but to confirm she had DNR (do not resuscitate) papers in place and if they were to AND (allow natural death), which we confirmed she does. As you can imagine, the call totally freaked everyone out and no one got much sleep after that. I called several times throughout the night to check on her and to remind them we wanted to be there if they thought anything was going to happen, we did not want her to be alone! They assured me we would be called if necessary.
Ken and I arrived at ICU at 8 to await doctors and to see Mom. We were joined by Ryan and Aaron and the long wait began. The rest of her night had been uneventful. Doc arrived late that morning and told us he needed to get another bleeding scan to find the active bleeding so he wasn't going in there blindly searching. Bleeding scan revealed NO active bleeding, therefore no surgery was done. (Blood she had in NG tube was old as well as another bloody stool revealing old blood.) They are going to keep her in ICU to carefully monitor her and if she does exhibit signs of active bleeding again, she will be immediately rushed to Interventional Radiology. We also had requested they put in a PICC line so she would not have to be "poked" so much. She has very difficult veins and it was extremely painful for her any time they had to draw blood.
When we saw her after the procedure (after another 2 unit transfusion) she was her perky self; sitting up eating jello and sherbet and fussing about having the bleeding scan again and questioning why they put in the PICC line!
So we continue to wait. She will be in ICU/CCU for the next day or so then on telemetry floor (5) for 3-5 days after that.
Well, off to work I go! Thanks for your prayers! Have a good day!
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