Mom Update 10/31

Update (9:29pm): After spending all day at the hospital with mom, I don't have much new info to report. She's still not actively awake, but by the time we'd left, it seemed as though the brief spells when she'd open her eyes were happening more often. She's still not moving her right side at all, but the neuro PA told us she did respond to pain stimuli, so she's at least got feeling (which is great).

We also learned that after a stroke, the brain swells. It won't be until after that swelling comes down that they will be able to do any real kind of assessment and diagnostics in terms of permanent damage. So there is still nothing we can do but continue to wait. It could be a few days or up to a week. Obviously, the sooner she becomes responsive (and the brain swelling goes down) the better. The most consistent message we got all day was that it's simply way too soon to tell.

The one bit of encouragement from the day was that as I was saying goodbye to mom for the day, she woke up a bit and tightly gripped my hand, squeezed it, and didn't want to let go (after trying to shove my sleeve cuff off my palm - she hates it when I pull them long). So the fact that she held on tight and did an action she'd do under normal circumstances was a good sign. Granted, it's a small one, but still good.

Update (1:09pm): Unfortunately I don't have any good news to report. She's still not moving on her right side (the stroke was in the left side of her brain - I think I said it backwards earlier), though she is fidgety on her left side. But she's still not awake even though she's not sedated. Not exactly sure what that means, other than that since she's not communicating and not actively awake, they can't assess the extent of the damage. Thus, it's a waiting game. There is nothing they can actively do at this point. We have to wait and see if she will come out of it. They were unable to even give us a best/worst case scenario as it's just too early to tell. And so we wait.

This morning I got a call from the hospital updating me on my mom's status. As I mentioned earlier, they had noticed that she wasn't very responsive on her left side. So this morning they did a CT scan and confirmed that she did have a stroke. They don't know yet the extent of the damage. It's possible that she could recover completely in six months, or it's possible that she may not. She's with the stroke team right now as they try to figure out what the situation is. A few months ago she had an unexplained subdurral hemotoma (sp?). They're now wondering if that is related to what we're seeing now.

Currently she's still pretty groggy, but that is normal. Mark and I are heading down to the hospital now - I'll update more when we have more info.