Bunn’s Prairie

So Kaley was admitted to the hospital last week with a bad case of clerical error. She came down with a temperature last Saturday and the nursing home staff couldn’t give her Tylenol for her fever because she had, according to their records, developed an allergy to it. This was news to me, but unfortunately there was nothing they could do on the weekend to fix it, so they sent her in to the University of Minnesota Fairview. Once there, the ER doc was able to see exactly what happened. Apparently the admitting doctor last time was a little aggressive in listing Kaley’s narcotic allergy and had listed Tylenol as one of them. The ER doc (who was already familiar with Kaley as he had admitted her several times before) corrected the mistake but decided to keep her anyways just in case the fever was something. So they took blood, urine, and all sorts of other stuff looking for infections. They sent her home on Sunday when the attending decided they weren’t adding any value (I couldn’t have agreed more).

One interesting thing about the weekend was that Kaley may have taken a baby step towards the next phase of recovery. She started reacting like her old self (i.e. I am tired of being in the hospital!), and her short term memory was working well. I was laying next to her and got up to get her a tissue, then I ran off the rest room. When I got back, Kaley looked at me and said, “why don’t you climb back in?” This is a good sign. Perhaps our working on short term memory retention is paying off. She also started try to do things for her self. We were sharing a Diet Coke and normally, I would put the can close to her and put the straw in her mouth. On Sunday, we did this a few times, but the next time she reached out with both hands to take the can and straw and hold it to her mouth on her own. Self care is key, I think, to the next phase of coma recovery and this was the first time she took responsibility for doing something for herself and she actually did it!

Kaley has been in and is back out of the hospital since my last post.  She went in for something different this time.  Since she got my cold she got dehydrated due to a bunch of little things.  So her sodium levels were way high.  They pumped her full of fluids for a couple of days and brought it back down into the normal range.

Kaley has been doing quite well mentally the past week or so.  Her short term memory is doing better and her she doesn’t seem to be as confused as much as she has been.  She still has my cold, but now is probably a good time to visit her.