Easter weekend

I've not had much time to consider the fact that this weekend is the Easter holiday. Rather, I have been far more consumed with the fact that my mom's been in the hospital for the past three weeks following a fall resulting in a hip fracture and subsequent surgery. She was released from the hospital in the days following surgery and then sent to a nearby nursing home for rehab, but during her time there, she began suffering from unrelenting nausea and a loss of appetite. Due to her not eating or drinking much of anything during her stay in the nursing home, she became weaker by the day and ultimately demanded to be released, thinking that going home would fix the problem. The trouble was that within 24 hours of being released, she worsened considerably to where she was sent back to the hospital only 24 hours after coming home from the nursing home because she was severely dehydrated and malnourished. Today she went home at last, feeling considerably better, rehydrated and her appetite restored at last. It turns out that the culprit behind the entire problem was Vicodin, which she was using as a sleep aide after having a bad experience on Ambien that she had taken to help her sleep. The day before her release from the nursing home, my cousin Anne, a physician, called her and my mom described the symptoms she was experiencing with nausea and lack of appetite. Anne correctly diagnosed the problem as a reaction to Vicodin. A male nurse who checked in on her after her conversation with my cousin confirmed the diagnosis, and it seemed that everyone knew that this was the problem except my mom. Had we but known that taking Vicodin nightly to help her sleep was causing such a problem, we would have asked her to be taken off of it immediately, saving all these hassles we've been having these past few weeks with her feeling sick, not eating and not drinking.

Now that she's had a second stint in the hospital and has received excellent treatment for her dehydration and malnutrition, she's quite back in the pink of things again and feeling quite like her normal self again. When I checked in on her Wednesday evening at home, she looked ghostly pale and was too weak to get out of bed. The next day, my brother practically had to carry her into the doctor's office and she was too weak to sit up and had to be examined lying down. The doctor ordered her readmitted to the hospital where she stayed until this morning. She is now home, resting comfortably and resurrected from feeling so weak that she was convinced she was going to die. I plan to stop by later on today to check on her and to see how she is feeling. I am assuming that she will want to take a nap in her own bed since she's only been able to do so for a short 24 hours before being sent back to the hospital. She probably will not feel up to cooking an Easter dinner tomorrow evening so I don't know what we are going to do with regard to that. Either my brother, his girlfriend and I will attempt to create something or we can go to my church for their Easter dinner that they will be having tomorrow. Either way, we'll try to do something to observe the holiday and to celebrate our mom's homecoming at last after three weeks in the hospital. It's good to have her home again and not to have to take those nightly trips to Ravenna to visit her in the hospital or nursing home. I've been living on sandwiches from Subway for dinner ever since this whole ordeal began, because the Subway store is between my house and the hospital campus and it's one way to get healthy fast food. However, I am more than ready to just eat at home again and have more time to myself now that my mom has returned from her lengthy ordeal. I really need some rest now that I have my evenings and weekends back without having to make mad dashes to the hospital all the time. Time to take care of myself for a change!