My mom has been in the hospital since Wednesday. Actually, this is her second time being admitted (north memorial) in less than a week. She was confused last Thursday night and all day Friday. Lori insisted she go to the Emergency Room, and they admitted her. She was very confused, didn't know my name at one point. She was in the hospital all weekend and was discharged on Monday evening. She was pretty confused (off and on but much more on than off) the whole time. According to dad, the confusion, if anything, got worse on Tuesday. They had talked about her doing rehab at a nursing home, but hospital physical therapy said she seemed OK to go home if mom and dad preferred that. There's more to that story - but she went home. Anyway, they told her not to do steps alone. Tuesday night dad went to bed around 11, told mom to go up with him, she refused and said she wasn't ready. At 4am he woke up and noticed she wasn't in bed. He called down to her, and she was OK, not ready to come up to bed. Sometime between 5:00 and 5:30 he woke to her yelling his name. He asked if she needed help, and she said yes. He got up and she had been going up the steps, she was one step from the top of the stairs and she was holding onto the railing on her right side with both hands, leaning backward. He ran to grab her and she let go. He saw her do a backwards somersault and then she slid on her back down the rest of the steps to the landing, where she hit the wall with her head (he thinks it was her head, but he's not sure). She laid there in a weird position with her eyes open, not blinking. He told me he thought she was dead. He ran down there and asked if she was OK. She said "yes, let me rest a minute and then help me up." He told her he was going to call 911. She said no, and he did it anyway. The paramedics picked her up (not gently, because you can't really pick her up gently, even if there are 4 people) and got her on a gurney and into the ambulance. He called me and some of my sibs. I was the first one at the hospital. They had me wait outside of the stabilization room because she was somewhere else in the hospital getting a head to toe scan. My dad showed up a while later, and then a while later they let us back there. She was moaning and crying with a neck brace and an oxygen mask and all hooked up. They had to restrain her arms because she was trying to fight them. It was an awful scene! Thank God, there was no blood. Apparently, just before we got in there, they gave her a second dose of morphine. They were calling her by her legal name, which she doesn't recognize. I'm sure that didn't help comfort her at all. It seemed like just a minute or two after we told her we were there and each of us took a hand that she slipped into a restless, painful sleep. While dad and I were in the Stabilization Room, the nurses told us that the scan did not show any bleeding in the brain or any broken bones. They moved her to a regular emergency room bed and after several hours admitted her to a regular room. My sister-in-law Jolene was there for a few hours during that time. Mom was unresponsive all day. For the most part, to say her name real loud in her face we would get either one or two eyes open and perhaps a single word answer to a very easy question, and then she slipped right back into a sleep state where she twitched and sometimes cried out. We didn't know if it's the morphine that was making her unresponsive or what. She is being followed by a trauma doctor as well as other docs, but none of them really talked to us the whole time I was there at least (6:30-2:30) on Wednesday.

Above was taken from an email I wrote to a few friends on Wednesday afternoon. Now it's Sunday. It's been a horribly stressful week. I thought we lost her, either that she was going to leave us or that she would never be able to talk to us again. I went to work on Thursday, and Lori called me late in the morning and passed the phone to my mom, who talked to me briefly. I was sitting in my office at work with tears streaming down my face. It was so good to talk to her. She progressed all day on Thursday and on Friday. Yesterday she didn't do well, and was very confused all day. She could answer basic questions about herself and her family, but didn't understand things like how to read the clock in her room or understand that it isn't a good idea to put black pepper on cheerios. I've been trying to be up there as much as possible, esp as a lot of my sibs haven't been able to visit. But, I also have a job and a family, so it's been challenging. The hardest part is the emotional challenge, which is for sure getting to my dad and my sister Lori, too. There have been some minor outbursts, but nothing major (yet). So far the plan is that she'll be in the hospital another day to several days and then go to a nursing home for rehab before she can go home.

The staff at the hospital say she's a "tough old lady" to have gone through all that and not break anything. I say she must have borrowed additional guardian angels who cushioned her fall so as not to break any bones or smash her head too hard. WOW!

On a lighter note, yesterday our little girl took her nap in the "big girl bed" for the first time, and last night she slept the whole night there! She was an angel this morning. When she woke up she got some books, took them back to bed, and was reading them to her doll when I got up. She told me she likes sleeping in her big girl bed. They sure grow up fast. Just a few weeks ago it seems like we were bringing her home for the first time.