6-5-2022 A quiet few days--thank goodness for Flagyl

(Tricia)

We had a few difficult days early last week, but the Flagyl, the antibiotic the hospice doctor prescribed for Linda's C.diff, is doing its job. Within a few days, Linda began to stabilize, and today, she is eating and drinking again. In fact, she has gone back to asking to feed herself again--she has a lot of trouble with stabbing the food or getting it to her mouth, but gets absolutely furious if anyone tries to help her. Given long enough, she can manage to get a few bites to her mouth. Eventually, when she gets tired, she'll do what she hates to do most--ask for help. :-)

Unfortunately, the few days that she was down completely with C.diff took their toll on her. She lost more mobility in her right leg (the side where she had her hip surgery). Before last weekend, we could bend it to at least a 60-degree angle, but now it can barely bend at all anymore. So, I have now added yet another phrase to my medical vocabulary too late to do any good: muscle contracture. I knew about muscle atrophy, but contracture is the next step down. It happens when someone is not moving their muscles at all. After as little as 24 hours of immobility, the muscles will begin to tighten; the longer a person is immobile, the more the muscles will stiffen, eventually to the point of no return. I knew that our muscles were a "use it or lose it" proposition, but I had no idea the loss could happen within just a few days.  Once again, the effort to treat one medical condition worsens another. It's an ongoing yo-yo effect, where Linda's yo-yo is bouncing back lower every time.

But she has been a bit more alert for the past couple days. I've started reading a good book to her that I had read for my book club, called Lessons in Chemistry. She tells me she is really enjoying it (probably because it's set in the 1950s and 1960s; it also features a dog quite prominently, and she loves dogs!). So we're covering three or four chapters of that each day. And yesterday, for the first time in a while, we were able to use the Hoyer lift to sit her back up in the Broda chair. We ate her favorite dinner (pork steaks and mustard-based potato salad, the way our mother made it) at the dining room table, and then watched a movie in the front room. Linda loves musicals, and we picked a good one: Amazon Prime's remake of Cinderella. It has fantastic music and dance numbers, not to mention one of Linda's favorite actors, Pierce Brosnan. It was very upbeat and a perfect option to raise everyone's spirits. Highly recommend! We asked Linda halfway through if she wanted to go to bed and save the rest for tomorrow but she wanted to watch it to the end. 

That said, we probably should have saved half of the movie until the next day anyway. By the time it was over at 10 pm, Linda had been sitting up for four hours, which was probably two hours longer than ideal, and it had been about that long since her last dose of pain meds. So, getting her back into bed was a bit traumatic. But once she was tucked back in, all was well.

So, with the C.diff back under control, my main worry is, as always, the potential infection in her hip. The caregiver pointed out some redness at the incision yesterday, which was very concerning and caused me to shed a few tears because I just want that joint infection to stay away. But Linda has been sleeping a lot on her right side, which could cause some discoloration. As Ed and I have discussed, there's nothing to be done either way, so all we can do is to watch it closely over the next few days and hope for the best, whatever that might be.