My mother had not been feeling well for much of April and into the first part of May, but, on May 6, my mother had to be hospitalized because of a urinary tract infection and other health problems that got so severe, she couldn't get out of bed. She was transported via ambulance to OSF Sacred Heart Medical Center in Danville, Illinois.
For the first couple of days in the hospital, she was making a good recovery, although she was still in quite a bit of pain. Then, on the evening of May 8, the hospital prescribed her an opioid medication to ease some of the pain she was having. She had opioid pain medication prescribed to her before without life-threatening side effects, but this time was different. The hospital staff found her unresponsive in the regular patient room she was in from a reaction to an opioid painkiller she was prescribed, and they moved her to the intensive care unit and put her on a bipap machine, which is a breathing machine with a full nose-and-mouth breathing mask. By the early morning hours of May 9, her condition had worsened to the point that she had to be intubated.
My mother has made it clear to me multiple times that she doesn't want to suffer for an extended period of time if she's declared terminally ill, and the hospital staff asked me if I wanted her to take her off of the breathing and stomach bile drain tubes she was on. The hospital staff never used the phrase "life support", but she was on life support, although she wasn't declared terminally ill. This is where things got interesting.
My brother, who is my mom's next of kin, wasn't able to travel from where he lives in central Ohio to the hospital in Danville, Illinois because, not only did he not want to take a day off work and risk losing his federal government job with the U.S. Census Bureau, he also didn't have a working vehicle to drive at that time because, unbeknownst to him, a cat had crawled up into the engine compartment of his pickup truck, and, when he went to turn the truck's engine on a couple of days or so earlier, the radiator fan blade killed the cat and caused quite a bit of damage to important parts of the truck. Without my brother being physically present in the ICU with my mother, I ordered the hospital staff to leave her on life support and attempt to resuscitate her if necessary.
By the evening of March 9, she was still intubated and on life support, but she was able to move her feet and legs around in bed and was able to hear people around her. On the morning of March 10, she took herself off life support without waiting for the doctors and nurses to take her off of the breathing tube and stomach drain tube.
My mother's recovery since the life-threatening opioid reaction has been going well, although her recovery will be slow and take a lot of time. One very good thing that is helping her in her recovery is that she doesn't appear to have any permanent brain damage from the opioid reaction, although my mom has an enlarged heart that she'll likely have to deal with for the rest of her life, so she can't tolerate a ton of stress.
As she's been on bedrest in the hospital for a while, and she needs rehabilitation to be able to physically move around her house and do basic tasks, the current plan is for her to be moved from the hospital to the Colonial Manor nursing home and rehabilitation facility in the Vermilion Heights neighborhood in Danville, where she'll begin rehabilitation likely sometime this week. However, this could change.
It's been a scary eight days for my family so far, although my mother, on this Mother's Day, is incredibly fortunate to be alive.
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