The first week

The first week and a half in the hospital has been a difficult one. It feels like she has half a step forward and then three steps back. Our favorite nurse Blaine says that life is throwing her boulders. So, mom was in the ER and they determined she had a pretty sever infection. They ran lots of tests that would take hours and even days to come back, so they put her on an IV drip of antibiotics for the time being. She was assigned a room in cardiac care because she was too sick for a normal room and not sick enough for an ICU room. Being in CCU has it's upsides and downsides. Mom gets massages with soothing music and aroma therapy, but is on a low fat and salt fee diet, even though she doesn't need that. So we've been sneaking her a bit or really for once in a while. The initial blood cultures came back with Staph Aureus, which is a type of bacteria every person has living on their skin at any given time. The doctors were astounded that a healthy woman (no cancer, HIV, other other conditions that would compromise her immune system) could get so sick from a prick on her finger while gardening, with a bacteria that most healthy people easily fight off. She had the infection in her blood, wrist, knee, lungs, and abscesses in the neck portion of her spinal cord. She was diagnosed with sepsis, and the first 24-48 hours were crucial to see how her body responded and if it would go into shock. The next morning, mom had knee surgery on her right knee to clean out the infection that was causing the swelling. They were concerned that if left unattended the infection would eat away at the cartilage and cause her issues in the future. The antibiotics seemed to be working, her wrist became much less swollen and inflamed. Her mind cleared and everything seemed to be going in the right direction. The IV antibiotics can not each the closed central nervous system to reach the infection in her spine, but the hope is that her body will be able to fight it off with the help it is now getting. In the following 2-3 days she began to swell and her kidney function was falling. They thought perhaps she was allergic to the antibiotics, so they switched one of them out. That didn't change and their new theory is that her body is attacking her own kidneys thinking they are part of the disease. Everyday her blood became more toxic and after about 3 days they prescribed dialysis. In those days she swelled tremendously. She gained 36lbs from her weight when she left SC. And over those two weeks she couldn't have had more than 300 calories a day because of her lack of appetite. Just before her first dialysis treatment she was having sleep apnea, trouble breathing, a very fast heart rate, and all those things improved with dialysis. We were encouraged. Then her blood count began to drop and it was a mystery as to why. They found traces of blood in her stool. The doctors seemed very concerned, and considered moving her to the ICU. She received two pints of blood and two days later needed another two pints. After an endoscopy, they found a duodenal ulcer and were able to treat it with IV meds. But it alone didn't explain the amount of blood loss she appears to be having. So they began injecting her with hormones to stimulate the bone marrow to produce red blood cells, an issue some patients in kidney failure have.