Days 1-4: Overview of how all of this started with our mom

Mom started having what she called "back spasms" Tuesday (1/27) and took a sick day on Wednesday, because she was vomiting and had diarrhea. The last message I had from her was, "I have the stomach flu. I had spasms in my stomach, lower back, hips and thighs. Didn't sleep much at all last night. I feel better, but still haven't eaten anything today. My whole insides feel like they are bruised." 

She went to bed that night at around 9:00 and then fell out of bed around 11:00 - if she hadn't, dad wouldn't have known that she was in such bad shape. He got her to their local hospital where they determined she had kidney stones and a BP of 58/33, so they transferred her via helicopter to Parkview North in Ft. Wayne, IN. She was checked into the ICU in critical condition.

Thursday morning, Christy and I both talked to her on the phone, she was sitting up in bed, reading and getting on some good pain meds. Around mid-morning, she started struggling to breath and had to be intubated and sedated. Her one kidney has 2 large stones in it, which are spiky and tearing up her kidney from the inside. The other kidney has small stones and became blocked, which combined with her bladder infection caused a "perfect storm", making her go into septic shock (don’t google it like our dad did). When they stabilized her as well as they could, they took her down to radiology to put nephrostomy tube in to drain the gunk off of her kidney.

Thursday was by far her absolute worst day. That night through Friday early morning was when we thought we were going to lose her.

When they were hooking her up to the continuous dialysis machine, her body wasn’t handling it very well at all. They came to get us from the waiting room and asked if we wanted them to get a priest or a chaplain, because they thought she wasn’t going to make it. I’m not sure how she was able to hang on, but she did. They got her going on the dialysis machine and kept her heart beating.

They ended up putting her on 5 different vasosuppressors to keep her blood pressure up and they were all maxed out. The doctors told us they were up against a wall and couldn’t do anything else to keep her pressure up. And she had gone into DIC. Fortunately, she was able to pull through and they’ve been slowly weaning her off of the pressors. She’s down to 1 medicine for her blood pressure and they’re working on weaning her off that one. It’s helping her heart pump, so they want to be careful with it. When she had her echocardiogram, it showed that her heart was only 35% effective (normal is 55% or higher).

Mom is on 2 strong antibiotics to fight the infection in her body. They are still pumping platelets into her, because her numbers have been really low. We’ve had just about every kind of doctor in here working with her and after the nurses rallied to try to save her Thursday night, we know most of them as well. This hospital has been nothing short of amazing – the folks here are so wonderful. 

She is still in extremely critical condition and needs your thoughts, prayers, light, juju, or even fairy dust. Any positive energy you can send her way is appreciated.