11-16-2022 Linda's awake and wanting to get out of here :-)

(Tricia)

Linda's still in the hospital, but everything is stable. When she was first admitted, they first moved her from the ER to a regular room,  where she stayed for all of about three hours before the doctor on call decided to move her directly from that room to the ICU. All of that confusion was a bit frustrating. But they took good care of her in the ICU, and with all of her vitals in good shape, they moved her to a regular room this afternoon. 

The CO2 levels in her blood, which had reached critical levels at the time we had her taken to the ER, have normalized. Now, she's on an oral antibiotic and a nebulizer treatment for a slight case of pneumonia, and they're trying to figure out how to make the drain, which the doctors at St. Mary's installed back in April, work. If they can clear any obstruction from the drain's tubing, they can remove any fluid from around her right lung.

But she's awake, eating, and talkative, and she says she's not having any trouble breathing. She doesn't like it when the nurses come in and move her around, but other than that, she's pretty chill, at least in the afternoon. :-)  When they got her to her new room today, she looked at the two nurses and said, "Thank you--thank you so much for your help."  (In the mornings, her mood is a bit stormier, as Marilyn has found! She is definitely ready to get back home.)

I know that this won't be the first time we have this decision to make, and next time, we are likely to choose home over hospital. But this time around, now that we know what was going on, I think choosing the hospital was the right call. As long as she's still comfortable and expresses a wish to get treatment, that's what we'll do. 

She's likely to be discharged back to our home over the weekend, where we'll get settled into a new routine again. This is all incredibly difficult to manage, logistically and especially emotionally, but the only thing we can do is just to take what each day brings as it comes.

(Funny story from this evening: We often have trouble convincing Linda to eat her full meals, and it was no different tonight. She ate about half of her chef salad and then said she was "done." I couldn't convince her to eat another bite. Well, Linda also has a quirk: If any food falls off her plate and onto her shirt or blanket, she becomes fixated on it until she can grab it and bring it to her mouth to eat. So, I took some hard-boiled egg from her plate and put it on her gown. She looked down, grabbed it and ate it. I kept doing that with every piece of egg, turkey, and tomato. Halfway through, she looked at me and said, "Stop it!" But if the food was on her gown, she still couldn't stop herself from eating it. Afterward, she said, "You know, I was hungry after all." Using this quirk might make me a bad person! But, hey, she ate all her protein. :-)  ]

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