It's Been a Scary Week

While many funny things have happened during the week, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday ended up being scary days.

One of the things that you have to do with congestive heart failure patients (CHF) is check their weight daily. With Grams, we also check her blood pressure and oxygen levels on a daily basis. Because she has diabetes, I also check her blood sugar multiple times per day.

When I checked her oxygen levels on Wednesday morning, they were at 60%.

Thinking that was a glitch in the telemonitor which sends her numbers to the hospice nurse, I checked it again with the pulse oximeter that we keep on hand. It was still at 60%. We gave her some additional medications in addition to the ones that she regularly takes, and I called hospice. The nurse was in a meeting, and I decided against having her paged.

I continued to monitor Gram's oxygen levels and when they went down to 56% as she was sleeping, I called hospice again and they paged Nurse Cindy. Cindy called me back right away and came out to the house as soon as she could.

We continued to monitor her oxygen levels all day, giving her morphine and breathing treatments. Her oxygen levels still didn't go above 70% except for when we took her to the cardiac doctor. That was really weird because at the doctor's office her oxygen levels went up to 93%, but by the time we got home they had fallen again.

On Thursday, her oxygen levels remained very low. She could barely walk and was having trouble eating or drinking so I called hospice again because that's what we do now. Nurse Cindy was out here at 8:30 that morning.

We continued to give her breathing treatments and morphine throughout the day, and we were really concerned that we were going to lose her or that she was going to slip into a coma. We learned that when your oxygen levels are that low for several days then you will slip into a coma.

Grams slept for most of those two days and by Thursday night her oxygen levels were miraculously back up to 90% percent. I say miraculously because we don't know how or why they dropped so low and then went back up. I say that it was answered prayer and thank you all for praying.

Since then she has been up and around and onery at times by telling everyone that I'm a meany because I make her take her medications.