Back at it again...

Oct 1, 2013

Tough start to the October month, I have to believe it will get easier as the month progresses. We were up at 4 am this morning with a lot of confusion on how to get from the bed to the bedside commode. With help she got to the toilet, but she didn't relieve her bowels. She has been stopped up for days now, maybe since last Wednesday. A male nurse from hospice came out to give her an enema at 6:45 ish. Come to find out the enema route wasn't exactly the route we should have traveled down instead she was/is still a bit impacted. Her poop is there, but so compacted that its extremely difficult to move on its own....supervised extracting with fingers is the easiest removal method. She will mostly take a stool softener from now on just to make sure the impacting doesn't happen again or atleast lesson the chances.

Two cool things learned today....

1 the male nurse said its not uncommon for patients with ovarian cancer to have the actual tumor to obstruct the bowel-not good!
2 the nurse Michelle said the more you poop with lactalose the more ammonia is in the body. Lactalose binds to the ammonia forming soft stool. Most likely if mom doesn't poop as a result of the lactalose she didn't have an ammonia build up in her body.

Michelle the nurse extracted a good amount of poop and said mom might need to have extraction done again as late or around Thursday or Friday. She did poop small chunks on her own at about 5 which us progress.

Fast forward to 8 pm after her lift chair got fixed by husband. I asked her if she wanted to sit in her chair and she was prettying unresponsive. I got pretty worried. Eric and I decided to call hospice for advise on how to proceed. An on-call nurse came out to moms and accessed her-with the fact that I wanted to fix the problem that was/is aligning her, the best solution is/was to take her to the hospital. We arrived at the hospital around 11 we followed the same route as the ambulance. We pulled up right behind her and husband could tell that it was mom lying in the back of the ambulance. They accessed her a bit before we were allowed in the ER room. They listened to our description and her own behaviors or lack of. They deduced her body was becoming sepsis- she was shaking, running a temp, unresponsive, and unable to follow commands. The planned action was to draw blood and cultures, start antibiotics, and get her to ICU.  She was headed up to the 9th floor ICU (the neurosurgical floor).