Paradox Blog

In March of last year, two weeks after she had returned home from a visit to the Bay Area, my mom fainted while taking a bath and was rushed to the hospital. She was diagnosed to have fainted from lost of blood, the result of internal bleeding in her stomach. She was kept in the hospital for treatment and recovery. Only one day after, she had a hemorrhage in her digestive system and was vomiting blood in great volume. She was moved to intensive care. My brother called me and warned me of the seriousness of her condition. I took leave of absence from work and flew home foreseeing a slow recovery.

Mom stayed in intensive care for about three weeks. At first she was drifting in and out of a pattern of confused speech and memory. She also throw fits whenever she gathered enough strength wanting to get out of bed and go home. She had to be restrained in bed. It was not a pretty sight. The only consolation was that she still recognized me and my brother though not others. I was pregnant at that time. Actually I only found out I was pregnant the day before I was to board the plane home. She had wanted me to get pregnant like all mothers do. Whenever she seemed receptive to what we were saying to her, my brother and I kept repeating the news of my pregnancy to her hoping to give her incentive to snap out her haywire mental state. Apparently it worked. Gradually, her speech became legible the same time her condition settled down to predictable abnormalities to which doctors prescribed all sorts of medicine. She was transfered to a regular ward for recovery.

There are three nurses on duty in the intensive care looking after eight beds. In the regular ward Mom was transfered to, two nurses have to look after twenty to potentially forty beds and we were told to hire a nurse's aid since mom was too weak to control her bladder and bowels let along getting out of bed to go to the bathroom. The nurse's aid will change her diapers, feed her and bathe her. Indeed we needed the nurses aid as the two nurses on duty only showed up three times a day, each time for less than five minutes to take mom's temperature, measure her blood pressures and administer shots if any is needed.

The hospital mom stayed in hasn't been renovated for a while and the wards are pretty old. Mom didn't like it a bit. She didn't like the nurse's aid either. She had developed paranoid tendency similar to that seem in a dementia patient. Seeing that she suffered great discomfort in the hospital we asked the doctor to release her as soon as he saw fit. He promised that once she could eat on her own she would be released. At that time she was fed through a tube hooking down to her stomach through her nose as her digestive system was all messed up. With the goal of going home in mind, mom strived and tried to get food down through her mouth. Two weeks after we were home.

Tending for mom at home was such a hard task that we had not foreseen. Her wits had degenerated and strength withered but her will was still headstrong though not strong enough to will herself back to health. She wanted to get out of bed and wobbled herself to the bathroom. She fell, twice. The last time it was hard enough that she suffered a broken rib. She also refused to take food in and only drank liquids once she's home probably because she had problem swallowing. To help her take in the nutrition needed for her recovery, her doctor put the nose tube back so that we could feed her through the tube. The tube was definitely not comfortable and she unplugged it after three days. Another trip to the hospital, another tube in place, only to be unplugged by her two days after. After three week's struggle, the doctor ordered her back in the hospital. This time she never left.

A few days in the hospital, she had not improved but instead showed signs of infection. Her weakness was shown through the low blood pressure she was measured and she was back in intensive care again. We were actually relieved that she was cared for in the intensive care as the care she received in a regular ward was quite negligent. Once in intensive care, she stopped showing any sign that she recognized us. She had completely retreated mentally though she still reacted to pain and touching. Her treatment was like patching holes on a levee along a flooding river, one is mended before another one starts to leak. It was a cruel sight to see her lying there with tubes all over, nose tube, IV tubes, urine tube, lung tube, EKG tubes and sometimes blood infusion tube. The looming question we had at this time was will she ever got out of there. She did got out of there, not because she was better but because the ICU was full and her condition was the least urgent so they moved her out once again. That move probably had speeded up her deterioration, two weeks later she passed away.