Thursday, October 9, 2014

All clear

We should be going home today. Dr. Floreth came in and said the MRI looks good. No sign of brain injury. The spinal tap came back clear of infection too. Can't remember if I posted that yesterday. So the consensus is the problem was from the Amitriptyline. All the other docs agree that the other medications she was on are fine and the dosages are good. They will start her back on those and send her home. I'm wondering what she is going to do about these headaches that have been persisting since the accident. The Amitriptyline was supposed to be for them, but we can't put her on something that makes he lose her mind. This is frustrating!

Maddy is still very tired but she got better sleep last night. No one bothered us from 1pm to 4am. Hopefully she will be able to sleep at home now that she is stopping the Amitriptyline. Now we just wait for the paperwork and all the consulting doctors to sign off on her discharge. They are trickling in a little at a time. Hopefully we will get out of here soon. Not that it really matters to Maddy right now, she's still sleeping. Guess she is catching up from that week of insomnia. Thanks again for all the prayers.

 

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Some sorta answers.

It's been a long night! But Maddy has getting back to her normal self. I think when I left off in the last post Maddy was finally sleeping after being given a dose of Haldol. We got up to the room around 10:30 and when the nurse didi her assessment Maddy knew where she was and why she was here. I almost fainted from relief but didn't want to count my chickens too soon. We got Maddy settled in and back to sleep by 11. Then the parade of wake up events began! It went like this...

  • Midnight - wake up and take oral medication she missed due to being in ER.
  • 1AM - wake up when nurse comes in to hang another IV antibiotic.
  • 1:50 - wake up when IV pump alarm goes off because Maddy bent her arm!
  • 2:00 - wake up when nurse comes in to switch antibiotic.
  • 3:00 - wake up when alarm goes off to alert the nurse the infusion is complete. Page nurse. Just as we drift into sleep nurse comes in to disconnect antibiotic.
  • 4:00 - wake up to take Maddy's vitals.
  • 4:15 - wake up to take Maddy's blood.
  • 5:00 - wake up to give Maddy her prograf and hang another IV antibiotic.
  • 5:50 - alarm goes off, antibiotic is finished. Sike! Still anothe 50ml to pump in, reset infusion.
  • 6:00 - oh wait, now they give Maddy her prograf. And take down the IV.
  • 7:00 - shift change, "hello I'll be your nurse today. I will be right back with your meds and to assess you".
  • 8:00 - nurse brings Maddy's morning oral meds and does assessment. Doctor comes in as this is being done. By 9 they are all finished.

Needless to say we didn't get much rest. I talked the nurse into giving her three hours of uninterrupted sleep. We put a do not disturb sign on the door and her nurse, Elisha, said she would push back any medications until then so Maddy can rest. Now on to the "sorta answers".

Dr. Floreth is the doc on this morning, which is great because he is the nicest and that's when Maddy needs right now. He said we are still looking into meningitis but those cultures can take quite a while to come back. He is also considering the side effects of the drugs she is on. Many of which can be dementia and confusion to say the least. He's particularly concerned about the meds they put her on for the concussion reacting with the anti anxiety and antidepressant meds she is on. He said the high dose of steroids she needed after the concussion can trigger adverse effects from those psychotropic drugs. So he is going to wipe her clean and call in the psychologist and the neurologists to reassess her medications and dosages so we can try to get the balance right again. He said he has seen this type of reaction before when someone has been on their normal drug regiment and something new happens, the new drugs put everything else out of whack. Also now that Maddy is more herself again she was able to tell us she has only been getting about 3 hours of sleep a night. Which is not good for anyone much less someone on such a precariously balanced regiment of anti rejection and other drugs.

So as I am won't to do, I just used 600 words to say what I could have said in one sentence. Maddy is feeling more like herself and they are resetting her medications in the hopes of getting everything back in balance. Oh yeah, two sentences. They are still looking into the possibility it's meningitis.

That's all for now.

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Confusion is back! Very bad 24 hours so far.

I don't have any solid answers but I will post this update anyway. Maddy started getting confused and sending weird garbled texts again yesterday. I was working and had a dentist appointment so was out of the house until after five. I spoke to her on the phone and she sounded mostly normal but I could tell something was up again. By the time I got home she was acting very weird and mixing up her phrases. I called the doctor, much to her distaste because she didn't think anything was wrong. Boy was she mad! They said to watch her for 24 hours and call in the morning with an update. Here is where things started to get hard. I was scheduled to run the sound board for the morning show while they did a live remote broadcast. That meant I had to be at the station by 5:30am. I tried to get Melissa to come hang out with Maddy but she was sick and had just gotten put on antibiotics that day. Then I called Ethan and invited him and his gf to stay the night so they could be ther for Maddy in the morning while I worked. That was cool with them but Ethan already had plans for the night so he asked if he could come over later. No problem! An hour later, problem. I got a call from Ethan screaming in pain, he has taken a spill off his skateboard and broken his arm. He was on his way to the ER in Northdale. I couldn't believe it. His update by the way is left arm broken near the wrist, both bones, and possible broken thumb. He's to see an orthopedist to get a cast in three days.

So with Ethan out I reached out to my sister, the sibling who lives and works closest to me. She agreed to drop everything and some over at 5am to sit with Maddy. Her work is flexible enough for her to work from her laptop sometimes. Fortunately today was one of those times. Elizabeth hung out and reported to me while I worked and then I got home as soon as I could. Oh, Brian of course heard through the grape vine (wonder who that could have been?) and he happened to be off so he came over later in the morning and kept Eliz company. I have great siblings!

Anyway, Maddy was still confused this morning when she woke up and even started hallucinating by the time I got there. She was very agitated and still very confused a lot of the time. I called the doctors while I was driving home so by the time I got there they were updated and on the job. They told us to come to the ER so we were out the door and heading here before noon. Last night I was hoping she was just having some residual effects from the concussion but by this afternoon I was not convinced it would be that simple.

The ER is crazy busy and it took a while to get her back. That didn't help matters because she couldn't remember why I made her come. Actually I don't think she was convinced I knew what I was doing. She thought she was fine. This is very unlike last time when someone pointed out she was talking to people who weren't there she accepted that her mind was not thinking right. This time there was no such acceptance.

All day long they have been doing different tests. Enyone who spoke to Maddy for more than 30 seconds could tell something was very wrong. They got an X-ray right away, then a CT scan of her head, then they did a lumbar puncture (spinal tap). Through all this Maddy just keep getting worse. She was having conversations with people who were not there. Every time someone tried to talk to her she slipped into aphasia and mixed up words, even whole sentences. They tried Adavant twice to help calm her down and give her brain some rest, to no avail. By the time they did the lumbar puncture, which she did really well for thankfully, she had deteriorated pretty bad. She was twitching, always rolling her eyes and scanning the room as if something was always just outside her preferial vision and couldn't sit still for ebp en a minute. I was worried she would freak out the minute I left the room for her perocedure. But she didn't, not until I got back!

The lumbar puncture was at around 5PM. She had spent an entire day, and probably a sleepless night last night, compleatly out of her head. She was so angry and agitated after the puncture I asked if ther was anything at all they could give her so she could get some relief from these maddening symptomems. They got her some halodrol, not sure I spelled that right. That ended up sets ding her completely off the rails. She went from laughing along with friends who were not in the room to kicking and screaming because she just "couldn't take it any more". I almost died during that hour. She finally fell into a twitchy running sleep. Like when a dog dreams and runs in its sleep. What ever is supposed to turn off your body when you sleep didn't turn off for her. That lasted another 30 or 40 minutes and just as she see,Ed to start to get some real rest they needed to take her vitals and start running some IV antibiotics. Fortunately that only set her off for 20 minutes. I think that puts her to sleep around 7:20 and she has been sleeping pretty well since then. (It's 9PM as I write this)

That's my nightmare, sorry I shared so much. I just have to get this stuff out. Some is cathartic and some is so I will remember exactly what went down for her medical history. So far we have no solid answers. Her CT scan looks normal. The X-ray was of course normal. They have not shared any of the blood test results. Oh yeah they took lots of blood! And we have not heard anything about the lumbar puncture. The only thing that seems to fit to me , and I'm no doctor, is that this is some sort of meningitis. You can go back in the blog to see what happened last time she got viral meningitis. I swear she looked like she was going to have a seizure any minute today. I'm kind of surprised they haven't done an MRI. I think that would give us a better idea if here were swelling in her brain. But I guess the CT looked normal enough to not call for an MRI. If I remember correctly it took a week or more to find out what caused the seizure back then, turned out to be the chicken pox virus crossing over into her spinal fluid and causing the meningitis. So I guess it takes a while to get results from that puncture.

In the meantime we sit in the ER... Oops, the nurse just came in and told us they are moving her upstairs. So i'll post another blog when I get some real answers.