Saying, thinking, writing the words magnifies a disconnect I’m feeling. Like it cannot possibly be true. No way. It cannot be my mom. In MICU? Never.
But it is. She doesn’t look like my mom underneath the wires, needles, tubes, masks. The silence definitely doesn’t sound like my mom. Her face is gray. Her arms are bruised and bloody from all the IVs and stained with yellow medical soap. Her hair is coated with blue glue from the EEG electrodes. Under normal circumstances this would greatly upset her and she’d be rushing to wash her hair.
It was Sunday morning. I had slept in a little bit and came to the kitchen where my daughter was playing with her toys and my mother was reeling my husband into a discussion about meals for the week. She was making a grocery list – one of her favorite things to do. She said good morning to me, I sat down across from her. We talked food for a few minutes. She then suddenly put her hand to her throat and said, “My throat feels funny.” She kept talking but her words were slurred. She then said, “My voice sounds weird.” I was instantly alarmed. Was she having a stroke? My heart was racing but I tried to keep her talking to assess things. Part of her mouth looked frozen but it wasn’t drooping. The right side of her body was fine. She got up and walked to the freezer. She was lucid. The slurring went away.
But I knew something was extremely wrong. My husband and I looked at each other with concern. I texted him even though we were two feet apart. He pointed to the grocery list my mom was writing – it no longer contained words in her pretty, flowery handwriting. It was scribbles, loops, like an old rotary telephone cord.
I ran to the bedroom to text her oncologist and do a quick Google search. My hands were shaking. My mouth was dry. I was nauseous. My husband followed me to the bedroom and said she had been fine all morning. He agreed she definitely should be examined – NOW.
My mom has severe anxiety and I didn’t want to unnecessarily alarm her. I threw on clothes, ran back to the kitchen and calmly explained that I just want to make sure everything is okay and we’re going to get checked out at the ER. I expected a full-on protest or meltdown but was met with neither. She asked me why and told me she was scared.
She stood up, put her hand to her mouth and muttered, “I hope I’m not having a stroke.”
I tried to comfort her and held her hand. She was still moving around fine but the slurring had returned. I grabbed her purse and a sweater and hurried us into the car. If it was a stroke, time was of the absolute essence.
The 10-minute ride to the hospital was bizarre. She was unusually quiet. In all of our previous trips to the ER – unfortunately this was the fourth, each time on a Sunday – she had nervously chattered, speculated what the issue could be, repeated she was scared. But this time she didn’t speak unless I prompted her.
We checked in and she said she had to use the restroom. I pointed to the door and assisted her through it. She walked in and stopped. She looked around as if she forgot what she was supposed to be doing, or how to use a bathroom. She did, then we walked out. The staff immediately put her in a wheelchair and guided us to a large exam room. A team of five or six rushed in, nurses, doctors, techs. They each clearly knew their roles and were moving insanely fast. They took my mom to an adjoining room for brain scans. A neurologist was already there ready to interpret the imaging.
The scans were all clean. While this was great news, it was also suspicious. What was going on?
A nurse told my mom to repeat her words and touch her finger to her nose to the nurse’s finger. She did it all, no problem. She was talking, even being a bit funny, almost as though she was drunk.
Fast forward an hour and things were in rapid decline. My mother was growing ornery, her normal cognitive state severely deteriorating. She grew confused and began yelling at me. Not in a mean way, in a childlike way. She repeatedly asked the same questions, even when I made her recite back to me the answer I had given seconds earlier. She asked for water but when she went to take the cup with her hand, it didn’t work. I held it for her and tried again. She took the smallest sip.
The right side of her body had grown noticeably weaker. When we had walked into the ER, she moved fine herself. Now she could barely get six feet to the bathroom without assistance. She brushed the wall walking in and nearly missed the toilet when she tried to sit down.
What the hell was going on?
With the help of a nurse, we got her back to the bed. She looked terrible. Her eyes were glassy and she could barely move her right side. She had no spatial awareness, no sense of her physical self. It seemed she could no longer see in front of her. She couldn’t follow a sound with her eyes or head. When my brother arrived at the ER, he had to stand directly in front of her and I had to hold her head so she could see him.
The neurologist asked to speak with me and said my mom was indeed having stroke-like symptoms but it was odd because her imaging was normal even after they repeated it. I learned then that with strokes, there is an intravenous intervention called TPA. It’s a medication that helps dissolve blood clots and restore blood flow to the brain. It’s highly effective but must be given within three hours. While my mom was in that window, she was also being treated for a previous blood clot in her leg. She was not eligible for TPA because she was already taking anticoagulants and at high risk for bleeding, which could be fatal.
She was eventually wheeled off for an MRI. She had been admitted to the hospital given the severity of symptoms and absence of a complete diagnosis. By the time they deposited her in her new, bright white, clinical room in MICU, she was asleep. We thought it was the Ativan they had given her to help calm down, but hours later she still hadn’t woken and had barely moved.
That was three days ago.