Dad is back in hospital again.
The reason for my cryptic FB message last week of:
If it’s not one thing, it’s always another.
This pattern seems to be the story of my life…
Either I am struggling with my own issues, or dealing with other family, friend or work issues. But I suppose that’s just life isn’t it? Although there are times that I feel like I do have more on my plate than lots of others. Maybe that’s just my own perception because there is of course so much that we don’t know about others. And I’m not in any way saying that I have it the worst. Just commenting that my plate is often full to brimming of things to deal with.
Mum txt’d me on Wednesday night just before I left work to say that she thought Dad was quite ill again and she wasn’t sure what to do…
So I went around to find him in a pretty miserable state.
He hadn’t been well for a few days, but everyone (including his GP) thought that he was brewing for another episode of shingles; and he had just finished another treatment for another urinary infection (these are very common now due to his catheter and are becoming more and more difficult to treat as he becomes more resistant to all antibiotic treatments for his particular type of urinary infection).
He’d been sleeping all afternoon, but had woken up and was shivering and thought he was freezing cold – despite having a very high temperature. We immediately recognised that this was a rigor chill he was having. (I am only familiar with this term after having one many years ago that signalled a severe kidney infection in which I ended up in hospital for).
In addition he was also very wheezy and his breathing was very rattled and laboured. Despite knowing nothing about the symptoms of pneumonia - this was my initial thought (also given the fact that he is old and pneumonia seems to prey on older people).
Before I fired up Mum’s computer to look up rigor, I knew that we had to get his temperature down and that paracetamol is good for that. So I told Mum to give him some. Dad was in quite a bad way, so we didn’t sit him up properly to swallow the tablets. Which as a big mistake as he then just started vomiting, which then made him cough in a terrible barking, fluidy kind of way.
In hindsight, we were dong the right thing, but stuffed up a bit in the administering side of things.
When I got around to checking the net – there are really only a few things that can cause a rigor. All of them bacterial and you guessed it… pneumonia was at the top of the list.
I didn’t really (and to be honest still don’t) know much about pneumonia. I thought it was just a cold that had gone bad or something. I didn’t realise that it can be quite contagious. I did know it can be dangerous for an older, fragile person to get as they can have trouble recovering from it and it can be fatal.
Obviously, as usual now with Dad whenever anything happens to him now – even if it’s not immediately serious like a stroke (for example when he tripped over earlier this year on the driveway and scraped himself. It wasn’t life-threatening, but his fragile condition makes it almost impossible for us to get him in the car and take him to emergency ourselves), we are mostly helpless in being able to get him to an emergency clinic ourselves.
So we have to rely on his alarm thing which when pressed alerts the security and someone from the ambulance will call back. This always results in a non-urgent (or urgent if required) ambulance coming to pick him up.
Sometimes in the non-urgent cases, we are not certain whether it is necessarily a hospital situation, but it’s the only option we can figure out. But invariably they always turn into a hospital stay anyway.
We did deliberate a wee bit, but in the end couldn’t really see any other option other than to call the alarm. I was pretty certain he had pneumonia and this would require antibiotics. The state he was in, I couldn’t see him being able to get out of bed the next day to go to the Dr for antibiotics. And we had to get his temperature down but he couldn’t swallow the paracetamol. (we had tried taking his temperature, but the thermometer was broken. He had it taken in the ambulance on the way and it was 38.something degrees – so was quite high). And I wasn’t keen on leaving it any longer during the night for the next day, as it seemed likely he would deteriorate more.
I also got alarmed when I read there were different strains of pneumonia. One being a particularly nasty one which can be quite dangerous. When I was reading out different things to Mum, she picked this one out. One of the peculiarities of that one was that patients can cough or vomit tea-coloured fluid. Mum informed me that Dad had indeed done that at lunchtime. She said he was just finishing lunch when this brown-red liquid came out his nose and mouth. After reading this and putting the information together it was a done deal that he needed to be looked at. I also told my brother to move away and go into his room because it would be dangerous for him to catch pneumonia only 6 weeks on from his major heart surgery.
So we called the alarm – much to Dad’s extreme annoyance. He knew the alarm always invariably resulted in hospitalization. Of which he wasn’t wrong. We always have to try to tell him that they will “just come to make an assessment and it ‘might not’ result in hospital”. But despite losing his faculties, he still has enough nous to know this is just talk on our part.Sometimes I think that we do genuinely kid ourselves that this may indeed be the case.
They arrived, took one look at him and bundled him up for hospital.
It was a busy night in A&E and so it took a while to get to Dad. Or it seemed like it anyway. He was in one room, but then got moved out into the corridor of A&E when there was another more serious case needing equipment. Dad stayed in the corridor for the rest of the night until moved to a room.
The gave him some immediate antibiotics, fluid, took blood and sent him for an x-ray (apparently he has “long lungs”!). Then it was just a waiting game really to get moved to a ward.
At times over the hours of waiting it was really awful sitting there having to watch him shivering like he had hypothermia and asking for more blankets – which he couldn’t have because they were still trying to get his temperature down. It seemed so awful and cruel watching him almost convulsing from shivers.
It felt like a particularly long night for me also as I had been looking forward to getting home from work that day as I hadn’t been feeling well myself. I was extremely RA achy, totally fatigued and was feeling wheezy and coughing a lot myself. But hey, what can you do.
In the end, Dad had relaxed a bit and seemed a bit sleepy so we left the hospital and hoped that he wouldn’t be too far away from being moved to the ward.
Oh, and just to confirm – my diagnosis was totally correct. He has pneumonia. We don’t yet know which strain, but they did say it was a nasty strain. So I may still yet be correct in my “full diagnosis”. I felt quite pleased with myself actually.
Funnily enough our family has had so much to do with health related issues over the years that Mum and I are now even acknowledged by different various Dr’s and specialists as being knowledgeable. One Dr a year or so ago said that I should train to become a Dr (I am very interested in health, but oh my… where do I start on the list of why I couldn’t do so…); a few months ago I was invited to be one of the “test” patients for Dr’s sitting exams to become specialists; and just the other day Mum and Dad’s GP said to Mum that she knows so much stuff now that she was sure Mum would pass a first year Dr exam!
