Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Happy New Year!!!


Welcome to 2015 everyone. Since this is my third Happy New Year post in the history of this blog I put three exclamation points in the title. Hopefully I'll be around long enough such that the number of exclamation points becomes ridiculous.

Instead of being a recap of 2014, this blog post will be another Mom update since there was some additional activity in 2014. At the end of the previous update she had been released from the hospital on November 26 after being admitted on November 22 for yet another GI bleed. I mentioned at the end of that blog post that based on the average number of days between hospital visits for GI bleeds in 2014, the next one would be due around January 29 of this year. It turns out we did not have to wait that long for another hospital visit, unfortunately.

You may remember that shortly after being admitted to the hospital in November, she had an episode where her heart rate jumped up to the 140s while she was resting comfortably in the hospital bed. That did not happen again during that hospital stay, but it did happen again on December 10 and then again on December 16. In both cases she was at home, at rest, and her blood pressure was fine when her pulse went up. There was no major discomfort (unlike the episode in the hospital), so she was able to lie down, take some additional blood pressure medicine, and have the pulse come back down after a couple of hours. And then it was time for Christmas . . .

Mom was having dialysis the afternoon of Wednesday, December 24 (Christmas Eve). After being on dialysis for about an hour she started having chest pains and could feel her increased heart rate, so she called my sister Amy and asked if she could come get her and take her to the hospital. Amy suggested that Mom instead have the dialysis clinic call 911 since she was having chest pains, which does seem like an obvious thing to do with those symptoms. Amy headed to the dialysis clinic, the ambulance came for Mom, and Amy followed the ambulance to the closest hospital which was one none of us were familiar with. The ambulance did not have its siren on, so the paramedics must have determined it was not a life or death situation at this point. I believe they gave Mom a nitroglycerin tablet in the ambulance and her heart rate started to come down.

Mom arrived in the emergency room and was admitted after they did the standard stuff such as drawing blood, taking a chest x-ray, and doing an EKG. Everything looked fine but they admitted her for observation and planned to do a chemical stress test the next day. Mom had the chemical stress test Christmas morning (December 25), no abnormalities were found, and she was released that afternoon. Merry Christmas! (Fortunately we had done most of our family Christmas stuff on Tuesday of that week, so no plans had to be changed as a result of this hospital visit.)

So that is how we finished 2014, with yet another hospitalization. The next post, which will hopefully be this month, will be the 2014 recap/year in review.


=====Monthly Blog Status Update===== 

As of December 31, 2014:


Total posts: 145 (1 in December)

Total pageviews: 22,300 (~800 in December)

Email subscribers: 12 (unchanged)

Total number of countries that have viewed the blog: 101

No new countries viewed the blog in December.
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