I’ve been staying on top of the COVID life – getting up with purpose. We still walk the dogs by 7. We’re home to shower and get to work by 9. Yesterday, however, we hit a glitch.
I received a phone call about 8:30am from one of the helpers at my mom’s assisted living apartment. Aaron seemed very concerned because my mom needed help getting going. He said she really needed someone to help her eat her breakfast. As he was telling me this, of course, I recalled the very lucid moment she had in the hospital with her grandson Sam. He was helping her eat by feeding her spoonfuls of applesauce. As she enjoyed each bite, she looked over at me and said, “I can’t lie. I really like being fed.”
While it was hilarious to hear, there was an element of truth to it. And the phone call from Aaron brought that back to me. But Aaron was adamant.
I arrived at her apartment shortly after speaking to Aaron to discover that, indeed, she was “not right.” She couldn’t stay awake. Literally, she would be talking to me and would just nod off. I tried to get her attention – she looked like she was just sleeping.
“Mom!” I yelled. She struggled to regain consciousness. But she was never in any pain. She really didn’t even seem to be bothered by how quickly she’d nod off again. We called her primary care provider – one week into a pandemic. They urged us to go to the northside urgent care which is more like a triage ER. When we arrived there were people outside checking on people who thought they might have coronavirus. Well, we knew that wasn’t our issue. So, I dragged my half-conscious 86 year old mother out of my car and just trotted myself up to the front door. I could see nurses and attendants inside, but everything was locked up.
“My mom needs help,” I said. “I think her sodium is really low,” I provided the only logical diagnosis I was familiar with.
“Does she have a fever or a cough?” was the reply on the intercom. “No,” I replied. Not everything is the virus, I thought.
“Go back and stay in your car and wait. Someone will be out with you shortly.” Well, I wasn’t going to drag my mother back into the car just to get her out again. So we waited. It was an unusually warm March morning, and we waited long enough for me to become concerned with sunburn. But finally an attendant came out. He tried to ask my mom the usual questions while he took her vitals. She wasn’t much help, but the vitals sure were.
An admitting nurse came out next and started walking my mom to the back of the building – the new triage entrance. She was going to be taken in to receive oxygen because her intake levels were 60%.
Yes! 60%! If she didn’t have her brand new value and pacemaker, she’d probably have been dead.
We spent the day-into-night at the northside urgent care until they decided that she needed to be transferred to a hospital. WAIT! WHAT? There’s a pandemic going on! She can’t go to the hospital.
And so she was taken by ambulance to the westside hospital, and I went home.
TO BE CONTINUED…