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rickvsI'm thankful that my mother's heart attack caused as little damage as it apparently did.
(That doesn't mean I'm not somewhat peeved at her for waiting through several days of symptoms before seeing a doctor).
Like this:
About a week before Thanksgiving, my mother started having some difficulty breathing, which she described (later) as a not-painful pressure in the center of her chest. She felt no tingling in her arm, and thought she might just have indigestion. She apparently didn't sleep much (if at all) on Friday night, and missed the funeral service of a good friend that weekend. (At the time, she told me she stayed home because her blood sugar was high, and didn't mention any other reasons -- but now, of course, I wonder).
Saturday, her doctor's office told her they'd be able to see her Wednesday. I dunno whether she described her symptoms, or just asked for an appointment.
Tuesday night, she was again unable to sleep, and the least uncomfortable position she could find was sitting up, with her feet dangling over the side of the bed. Here's where I get the most peeved: my mother has three other houseguests staying with her at the moment. One of them happens to be a nurse. Mom didn't wanna be a bother, and figured she had an appointment the next afternoon, so with a nurse *sleeping not thirty feet away*, my mother gutted it out all night and didn't wake anybody up to take her to the hospital.
Wednesday, I spoke to Mom a couple of times so that I could update her on our flight's (changing) arrival time, since she planned to pick Rachal and me up from the airport. When we actually landed in Boise, she told me that I should look for my sister -- which I took to mean that Diana was on foot in the baggage claim area while Mom circled a full parking lot. It wasn't till I called Diana that I found out Mom was in the hospital ...and Diana hadn't been asked to pick us up until an hour or two before. Apparently when Mom got to her appointment, and started telling the doctor her story, he interrupted her just long enough to have his receptionist track down the cardiologist, then told her to finish her tale and scheduled her for an immediate chest X-ray.
Friday she had an angiogram, and a stent was installed to keep open the blocked artery they'd found in her heart. The doctors noticed that a) she's got a couple more partially blocked vessels which they'll be addressing in the next few weeks, and b) my mother apparently had *another* heart attack some months ago, one she didn't notice.
Mom checked into the hospital shortly before we arrived, and wasn't released until we were on our way to the airport for our trip home. She found this pretty frustrating, and I don't know whether she was additionally bothered that she was at the same hospital my father died in a couple of years ago. We had some pretty good visits, at least -- I'm not sure I would have seen any more of her if she'd been home the whole time :> ...and if she was gonna be in the hospital, I'm glad I was there rather than planning to come up for Christmas, as we'd nearly planned.
Our Thanksgiving meal didn't change -- it was always supposed to be at my sister's house, prepared by her and her ex-husband. It was pretty damn good, and we brought along an old friend of my parents who'd never been to my sister's house -- after we'd left, his comment was, "They're, uh, kinda boisterous, aren't they?" I told him we'd caught them on a slow night, since the biggest excitement was my youngest niece getting sent to her room after smearing their vidcam's lens with mashed potatoes.
The rest of the vacation went pretty well -- I nearly got caught up on sleep, and the only airport snafu was having a layover of less than an hour at Denver's airport, when our arrival gate was at one end of a truly enormous terminal, and the departure gate was literally as far as you could get from the first without leaving the terminal entirely. Now try it with a wheelchair, which means you may not use any of the slidewalks between point A and point B. For funsies, add the lady United Airlines sent to push Rachal's chair, who was nice in every other respect but could have used a smidgen more English: she dumped us off to fend for ourselves, instead of calling her boss for permission to stay the extra five minutes to help Rachal onto the plane. (Denver's airport has been remarkably tight-fisted with their wheelchairs every time we've gone through. They won't leave the chair with you, needing to get each one quickly to where they're needed next. Understandable, mostly, but often a nuisance -- to us and them).
I did enjoy reacquinting myself with my mother's pets, and they with me. A couple of the cats even slept with us at night :>
(That doesn't mean I'm not somewhat peeved at her for waiting through several days of symptoms before seeing a doctor).
Like this:
About a week before Thanksgiving, my mother started having some difficulty breathing, which she described (later) as a not-painful pressure in the center of her chest. She felt no tingling in her arm, and thought she might just have indigestion. She apparently didn't sleep much (if at all) on Friday night, and missed the funeral service of a good friend that weekend. (At the time, she told me she stayed home because her blood sugar was high, and didn't mention any other reasons -- but now, of course, I wonder).
Saturday, her doctor's office told her they'd be able to see her Wednesday. I dunno whether she described her symptoms, or just asked for an appointment.
Tuesday night, she was again unable to sleep, and the least uncomfortable position she could find was sitting up, with her feet dangling over the side of the bed. Here's where I get the most peeved: my mother has three other houseguests staying with her at the moment. One of them happens to be a nurse. Mom didn't wanna be a bother, and figured she had an appointment the next afternoon, so with a nurse *sleeping not thirty feet away*, my mother gutted it out all night and didn't wake anybody up to take her to the hospital.
Wednesday, I spoke to Mom a couple of times so that I could update her on our flight's (changing) arrival time, since she planned to pick Rachal and me up from the airport. When we actually landed in Boise, she told me that I should look for my sister -- which I took to mean that Diana was on foot in the baggage claim area while Mom circled a full parking lot. It wasn't till I called Diana that I found out Mom was in the hospital ...and Diana hadn't been asked to pick us up until an hour or two before. Apparently when Mom got to her appointment, and started telling the doctor her story, he interrupted her just long enough to have his receptionist track down the cardiologist, then told her to finish her tale and scheduled her for an immediate chest X-ray.
Friday she had an angiogram, and a stent was installed to keep open the blocked artery they'd found in her heart. The doctors noticed that a) she's got a couple more partially blocked vessels which they'll be addressing in the next few weeks, and b) my mother apparently had *another* heart attack some months ago, one she didn't notice.
Mom checked into the hospital shortly before we arrived, and wasn't released until we were on our way to the airport for our trip home. She found this pretty frustrating, and I don't know whether she was additionally bothered that she was at the same hospital my father died in a couple of years ago. We had some pretty good visits, at least -- I'm not sure I would have seen any more of her if she'd been home the whole time :> ...and if she was gonna be in the hospital, I'm glad I was there rather than planning to come up for Christmas, as we'd nearly planned.
Our Thanksgiving meal didn't change -- it was always supposed to be at my sister's house, prepared by her and her ex-husband. It was pretty damn good, and we brought along an old friend of my parents who'd never been to my sister's house -- after we'd left, his comment was, "They're, uh, kinda boisterous, aren't they?" I told him we'd caught them on a slow night, since the biggest excitement was my youngest niece getting sent to her room after smearing their vidcam's lens with mashed potatoes.
The rest of the vacation went pretty well -- I nearly got caught up on sleep, and the only airport snafu was having a layover of less than an hour at Denver's airport, when our arrival gate was at one end of a truly enormous terminal, and the departure gate was literally as far as you could get from the first without leaving the terminal entirely. Now try it with a wheelchair, which means you may not use any of the slidewalks between point A and point B. For funsies, add the lady United Airlines sent to push Rachal's chair, who was nice in every other respect but could have used a smidgen more English: she dumped us off to fend for ourselves, instead of calling her boss for permission to stay the extra five minutes to help Rachal onto the plane. (Denver's airport has been remarkably tight-fisted with their wheelchairs every time we've gone through. They won't leave the chair with you, needing to get each one quickly to where they're needed next. Understandable, mostly, but often a nuisance -- to us and them).
I did enjoy reacquinting myself with my mother's pets, and they with me. A couple of the cats even slept with us at night :>
