All Is Well Again

Last night's visit was good. When we saw her at one of the visits yesterday (don't remember if it was AM or afternoon), she had been imagining that someone was trying to remove her tubes and do her harm. She was afraid that because she couldn't scream and with all the medications knocking her out, she was a good target. She insisted that there was another patient who came in and was removing her tubes. Well, as it turned out, the respiratory therapist *did* remove her from the ventilator, but in her state, she apparently thought he was trying to kill her, and she was worried because she couldn't scream. We told her it was the respiratory therapist, showed her how to hit the nurse call button, and also showed her how close her room was to the nurse's station (so everyone could keep an eye out for her), which seemed to calm her down.

While we were there, though, they said she had been off the ventilator long enough, and called for the therapist to come back and hook her back up. Aunt I insisted that either the nurse or dad and I be there when that happened. We were there when he showed up, we introduced her to him (Brian), told her what he was going to do, she nodded, and he went about his business. I held her hand for as long as I was not in his way, then held her foot, talking her through the whole thing. After it was all done, he looked at her and asked if she was okay, she nodded and mouthed 'yes.' I asked her if she was okay, and she did the same thing. Then she went looking for the nurse's call button. I took her hand and made her look at me, and told her it was okay, that it was Brian who put her back on the ventilator and now she could get some rest, let the machine work for a while. She relaxed her grip on the button and held my hand for a while until I think exhaustion took over. When we left, she had closed her eyes and was going to nap.

Last night - 180-degrees different. She was laughing, asking about the weather, scratching her head and saying it felt like bugs, and shifting and wiggling in the bed. The nurse had said they might try to put her in a chair in the afternoon, so when we asked aunt I if they had done that, she said yes. She even said the view looked almost the same as from the bed. Wellllll.... when we talked to the nurse, uh, no. They had decided to concentrate on her lungs and didn't want to push her too far, so the chair would be delayed to today or Saturday. Nice drugs, apparently. Otherwise, she looked better and wasn't having any strange delusions about the resp therapist.

I'm losing track of the progress at each visit. I need to be more vigilant documenting what happened during each visit.

Well, at the end of my allotted time at Starbucks. Back to dad's I go.