7-26-2021 Discouraging day

(Tricia's perspective)

Marilyn spent several hours with Linda this morning, and while she was there, Linda mostly slept, sometimes speaking unintelligibly. Ed and I spent the evening with her, and she was similarly quiet. As encouraging as yesterday was, in terms of her liveliness and ability to speak, today was equally discouraging. This evening, during hours when she's usually at her most active, she kept her eyes closed most of the time. At one point, we think she said that she could not open her eyes. At first, we thought it was simply because she was tired, so we sat with her and read, but eventually, she opened her eyes and looked very listless, staring at the ceiling and rarely making eye contact with us. When we asked her if she was OK, she seemed unsure how to answer. And when she tried to answer, we could not understand her. This after almost every word she said yesterday came out clearly. 

When we see progress, it's so wonderful, but when that progress is followed by apparent regression, it's easy to lose hope once again. It's so hard to know what is part of the normal up-and-down recovery from a coma and what might be an ongoing setback.

We plan to ask the nurses tomorrow if there was any change in her medications that might explain her listlessness. But otherwise, we're hoping that she was simply tired today and needed to rest, and that she'll be back with us tomorrow.

Comments

  1. UnknownJuly 27, 2021 at 8:42 AM

    I'm so sorry. Yes, the better-worse-better-worse alteration makes it hard to trust the next "better." But sometimes recovery is not linear. So I hope the 27th is a better day.

    ReplyDelete

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