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anghraineI've talked a bit on Tumblr about it, but my mother has been struggling with her health for several years. She was doing better for about... I don't know, six months, after I bullied her into getting a referral from her distracted rural doctor who mostly just cared about the possibility of her a) abusing her psych meds and b) losing weight, and even when her oxygen levels were hovering around 91% in his own office would just prescribe prednisone at best. She was already disabled when she was hit by a car several years ago (she was driving her mobility scooter through a crosswalk at the time) and she has fairly severe asthma (she didn't even own a nebulizer and I'd also bully her into using mine when possible).
We're pretty sure she had a bad case of long COVID at one point, but anyway, I did insist on her seeing an asthma specialist in the city and that led to seeing other specialists and generally she was doing quite a bit better. But her lungs have been in pretty bad shape for a long time and it was a slow recovery from months on end when she was coughing up phlegm, choking on it when she tried to sleep, and coughing so much that she could barely carry on a conversation until a few weeks ago.
Then she picked up what everyone assumed to be the flu. She was apparently doing pretty badly; we came by to drop off some equipment (including my nebulizer!!), but she didn't want me getting too close because I'm also immunocompromised and she didn't want me catching her miserable flu that was aggravating her asthma. She seemed to recover from that and then got much worse—I later found out that her pulse oxygen crashed to 71% a couple of nights ago, she'd been taken to the local hospital, given treatment that brought her up to 86% while they did some tests to figure out what was actually going on. They sent her back home, determined she in fact has pneumonia, but she crashed another time and my father correctly called the ambulance immediately and she was ultimately taken to a hospital 100 miles away.
At this point, it's been determined that she actually has three cases of pneumonia in different parts of her lungs and sepsis and her lungs are apparently in bad enough shape to be drawing on her heart in some way, which given that she has arrhythmia and some other heart damage from a severe childhood illness, is super not ideal (apparently they were struggling to get her resting pulse below 140). My dad keeps travelling between home and the hospital and says she's improved, but they're (correctly) keeping her there. When my mother called yesterday to update me, she admitted that basically any activity at all jolted her heart rate further up and she wasn't even allowed to go to the bathroom without supervision because of it, and that she'd earlier been terrified she was going to die.
J (my best friend since middle school, whom I live with, and who my parents helped raise) and I have been going to and from our home to my parents' house, looking after the animals and cleaning things and so on. It's been a lot, for sure. My mother gets anxious about a lot of small things, so we've been assuring her that we'll help Dad with basically anything (she was worried about the lawn mower...) and take care of him, with the fairly obvious subtext of "even if she dies" though she didn't explicitly say that.
Apparently the hospital team working with Mama have said that all this was entirely preventable if her problems had been taken seriously earlier. So. I've both been pretty quiet and full of both anxiety and seething rage. J has been a champ (though sometimes thinks giving me things to do helps distract me, when it mostly just makes me more stressed at what's already a very stressful time, but I think I managed to convey that without being too much of an asshole, given that it's hard for him too). And ... yeah.
The main effect on fandom is that I have a bunch of posts and reblogs and responses to asks in my Tumblr drafts and am avoiding posting them because it's hard to judge how abrasive they would come out as right now. I also want to do some crossposts but obviously the trips to my parents' house and looking after their animals and my own move and navigating my university's bureaucracy blahblahblah is taking up a lot of bandwidth and also time. There's no pressure really, I just hoped I'd have more time to decompress after the degree. I guess it's better in a selfish sense that all this happened after I finished the dissertation and everything, but mostly I'm super anxious, I've breathed a bunch of disinfectants etc we're using at my parents' place and feel rather mediocre, my entire body hurts and so forth. I'd feel shitty about "what about meeeeee" complaining to my family or J, but it helps to vent here.
So that's all happening!
We're pretty sure she had a bad case of long COVID at one point, but anyway, I did insist on her seeing an asthma specialist in the city and that led to seeing other specialists and generally she was doing quite a bit better. But her lungs have been in pretty bad shape for a long time and it was a slow recovery from months on end when she was coughing up phlegm, choking on it when she tried to sleep, and coughing so much that she could barely carry on a conversation until a few weeks ago.
Then she picked up what everyone assumed to be the flu. She was apparently doing pretty badly; we came by to drop off some equipment (including my nebulizer!!), but she didn't want me getting too close because I'm also immunocompromised and she didn't want me catching her miserable flu that was aggravating her asthma. She seemed to recover from that and then got much worse—I later found out that her pulse oxygen crashed to 71% a couple of nights ago, she'd been taken to the local hospital, given treatment that brought her up to 86% while they did some tests to figure out what was actually going on. They sent her back home, determined she in fact has pneumonia, but she crashed another time and my father correctly called the ambulance immediately and she was ultimately taken to a hospital 100 miles away.
At this point, it's been determined that she actually has three cases of pneumonia in different parts of her lungs and sepsis and her lungs are apparently in bad enough shape to be drawing on her heart in some way, which given that she has arrhythmia and some other heart damage from a severe childhood illness, is super not ideal (apparently they were struggling to get her resting pulse below 140). My dad keeps travelling between home and the hospital and says she's improved, but they're (correctly) keeping her there. When my mother called yesterday to update me, she admitted that basically any activity at all jolted her heart rate further up and she wasn't even allowed to go to the bathroom without supervision because of it, and that she'd earlier been terrified she was going to die.
J (my best friend since middle school, whom I live with, and who my parents helped raise) and I have been going to and from our home to my parents' house, looking after the animals and cleaning things and so on. It's been a lot, for sure. My mother gets anxious about a lot of small things, so we've been assuring her that we'll help Dad with basically anything (she was worried about the lawn mower...) and take care of him, with the fairly obvious subtext of "even if she dies" though she didn't explicitly say that.
Apparently the hospital team working with Mama have said that all this was entirely preventable if her problems had been taken seriously earlier. So. I've both been pretty quiet and full of both anxiety and seething rage. J has been a champ (though sometimes thinks giving me things to do helps distract me, when it mostly just makes me more stressed at what's already a very stressful time, but I think I managed to convey that without being too much of an asshole, given that it's hard for him too). And ... yeah.
The main effect on fandom is that I have a bunch of posts and reblogs and responses to asks in my Tumblr drafts and am avoiding posting them because it's hard to judge how abrasive they would come out as right now. I also want to do some crossposts but obviously the trips to my parents' house and looking after their animals and my own move and navigating my university's bureaucracy blahblahblah is taking up a lot of bandwidth and also time. There's no pressure really, I just hoped I'd have more time to decompress after the degree. I guess it's better in a selfish sense that all this happened after I finished the dissertation and everything, but mostly I'm super anxious, I've breathed a bunch of disinfectants etc we're using at my parents' place and feel rather mediocre, my entire body hurts and so forth. I'd feel shitty about "what about meeeeee" complaining to my family or J, but it helps to vent here.
So that's all happening!
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on 2024-07-06 12:37 pm (UTC)no subject
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on 2024-07-06 10:07 pm (UTC)You have all my sympathy.
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