Just when I thought things were settling down and not much else could possibly be thrown into the mix, we had Thursday.
Thursday mornings are when I go to the Infusion Center at the hospital and get my methotrexate injection, every four weeks I also get Orencia infusion, to treat my rheumatoid arthritis. I don’t generally like leaving my mom home alone when I go for my appointments so I get her up extra early and take her with me. This past Thursday we decided to go out for breakfast after my injection.
We went to a restaurant near our home and enjoyed a nice meal. We were almost ready to leave and my mom needed to go to the restroom. It has been nearly seven months since her stroke and she is trying to be more independent. She insisted she could go to the restroom on her own and against my better judgment I didn’t insist on walking with her to the bathroom. Unfortunately, she fell in the restroom stall. It’s unclear if she slipped and fell, tripped and fell, regardless of how it happened she ended up cutting her lip. The restaurant called 911 while I went in to help her. The paramedics came to the restaurant and checked her out. They assessed her and determined she was not having a medical emergency and that I could take her home as long as I scheduled an appointment to take her to be seen for sutures in her lip that same day.
I took her in to the Minor Injury Clinic, they applied glue to the cut on the outer part of her lip and decided that the cut on the inside of her lip was best to left alone. I mentioned to the Nurse Practitioner who saw her that while in the waiting room I had noticed a twitching in her hand, something that is very much out of the ordinary for my mom. Once in the exam room I noticed she had some facial twitching as well. The Nurse Practitioner suggested that we monitor anything else out of the ordinary and contact my mom’s primary care provider. We got back home and I settled my mom in to the couch to rest with an ice pack. Mr. Bubbinsky stayed home with her while I went to Mr. Snugglebunny’s school to pick him up and deal with an Athletic Board task. Mr. Bubbinsky called me to tell me that my mom had fallen again and she was not responding to him so he was calling 911. He wasn’t in the room when she fell so we didn’t know for sure what had caused her fall.
A friend of mine was wonderful and took Mr. Snugglebunny to my in-laws house after school while I drove home to figure out what was going on. By the time I got to the house the firefighters were making an assessment and the ambulance was on its way. I freaked out on my way home because I had no idea what had happened and I wasn’t there to see for myself what had happened or what was happening. The firefighters were very reassuring – her heart rate was good, her blood pressure was in the normal range, her breathing was steady, her blood sugar was normal, her neurological assessment didn’t lead them to believe she was having a stroke. In their experience they thought it was most likely that she had a seizure. She’s never had a seizure before and there is no family history of seizures.
In the emergency room they did all sorts of exams – CT scan, blood work, urine analysis, etc. They determined that the most likely scenario was a seizure and she’s now taking an anti-seizure medication. She is also on a course of antibiotics for a small infection they found in the lab work. When we were close to discharge my mom said she remembered that her whole body had started shaking when she was laying on the couch – confirming for all of us that she had a seizure. This coming week she’ll have an EEG and a follow-up visit with the neurologist. The ENT is also still trying to figure out what happened to her hearing, she’s due for her follow-up hearing test to determine if they’ll continue with the steroid injections into the middle ear space.
My mom says she’s done, she doesn’t want any more medical incidents. I don’t blame her, I don’t know how much more we can handle and I really don’t want to find out.
