Well, this has been a pretty shitty day. It feels like whatever can go wrong, does go wrong. Mom is in room 851, the Intensive Observation Unit with deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolisms. The only good thing is that she is as upbeat as ever. Which is no surprise whatsoever. Of course, those of us who know and love her are at wit’s end with worry. I find it is much easier to be upbeat when I am with her than when I am not. On the other hand, I slept like shit last night and feel like the walking dead again.

Mom was telling me how everything went last night after I left her. It was pretty hilarious. I left her around 10, I think. By midnight nothing had been done so she asked that the doctor be sent to her room. She asked if they were planning on giving her the anticoagulants any time soon or if they were just waiting for her to throw a clot and drop dead. Ten minutes later she had an IV of Heparin. Well played, mom. Well played. We talked about how Monday was a long day, but that we had a lot of fun together and laughed a lot. She enjoyed her shrimp lunch. This woman is an inspiration!

Apparently the anticoagulants caused a very small bleed in her brain, so they shut off the IV for an hour before resuming it. Sure as hell hope these folks know what they are doing……. My confidence in this place is not so great at this point.

As I was sitting in my bedroom with my laptop, writing, I realized my phone battery was way low, so I plugged it in. Shortly after that the doorbell rang and a friend of ours, who was spending the night arrived. I ran down to answer it and walked out to the patio with him to where Rick was. I sat with them for about an hour and went upstairs to go to sleep. I checked my phone and the little icon showed the number 10. That means 5 calls, 5 messages. All, I could think was that something horrible had happened. I listened to the oldest first and worked my way to the newest. Four of the five calls were from my mom. Each one angrier than the last. It turns out that not only did TMC not know she was on chemotherapy, none of her doctors, the neurosurgeon (or neuro-nazi as many refer to him), nor her neuro-oncologist noticed that the Temodar was not on the medication list. I remember mom and I talking about the drug to the nurse at check-in. Mom was totally pissed at me for not answering my phone. It felt like  all the time I had spent with her and everything I had done, meant nothing. I let her down, by not answering my phone for 36 damn minutes.

I called the nurse before I called mom, because frankly I was scared to talk to her. I wanted to hear the bottom line. She explained what happened, and when I asked her about mom going home tomorrow, she said she didn’t see that happening with everything that was going on, and that she was not stable enough to leave the hospital as far as she could tell. It feels like I have used those exact words before…..It turns out Patricia let Bob in and gave him the drugs and he ran them over. The nurse put me through to mom who explained that she got her drugs and then proceeded to tell me how upset she was with me for not answering the phone. Like I didn’t hear it the previous four times on voicemail. Ouch.

So now we wait. And hope.