I was right. Something was wrong. Very wrong. Yesterday was another insanely tough day. Jane, the occupational therapist who had been working with him regularly the past week is probably the best besides me to notice the difference. Instead of working on trying to get him out of bed, she focused on cognitive function. Asked him lots of questions. Some he got right, some he got wrong and some he didn't answer. He struggled to move his arms and tended to favor his left instead of dominant right hand. She encouraged me to keep trying to engage him. After she left he was tired and it got harder and harder to wake him. I tried. His nurse came in and noticed that things were worse. I'm so grateful for his concern.
He paged the doctors and people kept coming in to ask him questions. They decided to call a "brain attack" code. Before his room and the hallway filled doctors and nurses, a social worker came and sat by me. She said she works with the ICU team and they told me who each of them were and what they were doing. They needed an iv with a larger needle and tried to get that while hooking him up on portable monitors. They whisked him away for another CT and also an MRI. While his room was empty I took time for myself to recenter.
The CT and MRI again ruled out a stroke. They brought him back to the room and ordered an EEG to check the electrical activity in his brain. Took quite a bit of time to hook him to all of the wires. They pestered him with more questions, he didn't respond. They had me hold his eyes open, which he hated. The results showed no seizures, but swelling on his brain. They talked about moving him back to ICU but he didn't meet the criteria. So he stayed here and they monitored him more regularly.
The rest of the night was fairly quiet and uneventful. We both got a little bit of sleep.
This morning we've already had a ton of people in and out. He's been asked all of those questions like that we normally think are annoying, but are important. "Do you know your name?" "Do you know where you are?" He is a bit more awake and will occasionally answer "Yep" but still struggles to move or get words out.
The belief is that as his kidneys have been failing, medications have built up on his system. They mentioned they may do dialysis but his blood pressure is low again that he would need a different type. It would also mean moving back to the ICU.
With everything we've been through, it continually confirms to me just how amazing the human body is. It is simply miraculous and divine that we are alive. When things go wrong, which for us has been a too common occurrence, I continually astonished with just how much it takes to simply be alive. It's a tough fight, but I can see how much he is fighting now to come back to me. The only two words he's put together are "Hey, Baby". He knows who I am, ❤️ keep fighting Sweetheart!
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