Emotional Rollercoaster

It has been a hard couple of days. But today we had a mixed bag. First of all, they took Mom off the ventilator to see how she could do on her own. So far, so good. She is working harder to breathe on her own, but her oxygen levels are staying good. Today she coughed, too. I learned that when you lay there the normal saliva your body makes and you swallow instinctively just stays there and goes into her air passage. One reason they had her on the ventilator was so they could easily suction out those fluids. But her ability to cough forces the fluids out of her lungs. The challenge now is that her swallow reflex isn"t working. So they suction out the back of her throat when she coughs and can"t clear her airway. That is a step in the right direction.

The hardest part of today was hearing the doctor tell us in concrete terms what to expect. Mom will be several weeks still in the hospital, then to a nursing facility until she is strong enough for rehab. Then a month of rehab to see what she will be able to do. Dad asked outright "will she ever be back to normal?" The doctor said, "I doubt it, but we hope she can get pretty close."

A good thing about today was that my brother, Chris, is here from Alaska and was able to be there at the hospital to hear all this. I am so glad he is here to see for himself what we are dealing with so he can have a better understanding of what is going on. It relieves me knowing that he knows exactly what we are going through. And with him here, I get to come home for a few days. :)

As I told Dad today, we just have to take this one day at a time and we"ll get through it!