Friday, May 13 - Up and Down

This blog site has been down for a few days and was in read-only format until just now. I guess they've fixed the bug and we're back in business so I'm posting the things that had been written over the last two days now. Many of you received this in email format this morning. . .

Briefly, Mom had made major strides on Wednesday and Thursday, really increasing her activity level (with help of friends/nurses/physical therapists and with a few handy devices including a walker). It has been awesome to see her up and about, regaining her strength and mobility little by little. (For more on those two days, see the post below).

The city was bathing in that great, golden glow as the sun rose this morning on my way in to see Mom. Turns out she had a much, much harder night last night. Up much of the night, sick to her stomach, generally not feeling well. We are thinking that much of this is related to a new pain medication that was started last night (and which has since been discontinued). It's been
a bit of a rough morning for her.

Dr. Powell has been out of town at meetings and such so she has been seen in person by the residents and one of Dr. Powell's colleagues. However, Dr. Powell did call this morning and had a good chat with Ellen (and somewhat with me as I got to participate with her on speaker phone). Essentially, she expressed her satisfaction with mom making great progress increasing her
activity and working to get the pain under control. She also thinks this bad night/morning last night is likely related to the medication and that all in all, mom is improving slowly but steadily on the right trajectory. She also had a really good heart to heart with her about not pushing to go home too soon. As Dr. Powell puts it, people often think that when they get released it means
they've achieved something great, they get an A+ or extra-credit or a sticker or something, but
in fact she won't be handing out stickers (what?!?!). She reinforced for mom that the hospital time is a time for her to continue to improve her strength and mobility with a lot of trained help around. Going home can sometimes actually be a setback and can be harder when suddenly you don't have the same amount/type of help, etc. So. . . she really encouraged her to readjust her expectations, to not feel like a failure if she's in the hospital into next week, but to really take advantage of being here, to focus on using this time to find a pain-control regimen that really works and to use the help here to work on mobility. So. . .mom is working on readjusting her expectations and being gentle with herself.

She did a great job with the physical therapist this morning, walking with the walker and practicing getting in and out of a chair and bed. She's able to bend her knee about a centimeter but still has very limited mobility in her leg so all of these things- getting out of bed, in bed, walking- are very hard. The thought at this time is that these things should recover completely but it will likely take quite some time. All the activity this morning took a lot out of her and she's pretty exhausted. Still feeling a fair amount of pain, still sick to her stomach and more fragile today so trying to get the rest she needs to keep on the recuperation track. We're encouraging her to take it pretty easy, although she will be getting in and out of bed a lot more today. Ellen is
keeping a positive, relaxed attitude despite the difficult night and morning.

While she's not up for visitors today, please do keep all those great healing thoughts coming her way. They help more than you can know.