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feeling: tired
listening to: my cell's ringtone is stuck in my head >.>
Forced awake at 7:30 this morning so I could go with my parents to visit my grandma in the hospital. Not that I didn't want to go, but... that's like, the middle of my night. =___=
Whole point was that she was to have a heart catheterization at some point today, but they had a full schedule so she didn't have a scheduled time... was just on some sort of a will-call basis. But we went to support her because this was the test she (and some of us also) were afraid she wouldn't survive through. Apparently when they admitted her on Tuesday she literally felt on the verge of death... but apparently just being forced to lie around and rest helped, because my dad and uncle were talking about how she looked and sounded stronger this morning than she has in months.
Anyway, only minutes after we arrived, they came in and announced that they had an opening for her procedure, so they took her right to it. Edgy few hours for everyone as we awaited the outcome. Turns out she made it through just fine, and the results were not perfect, but better than everyone expected. They found three non-critical problems... 75% blockage in her circumflex artery (one of the three major arteries that lead out of the heart... I know this from dissecting that cat in EEOB class ><), excess pressure in the heart keeping it from relaxing as well as it should between beats, and pulmonary hypertension (I think they said hypertension...). All treatable with medicines. They decided to give her a chemical stress test tomorrow morning to see how big a factor the 75% blocked artery is in her labored breathing, then to keep her there a few extra days to make sure the new drugs they're switching her to will actually do their job. She should be home early next week.
I don't really understand why they were never able to diagnose these problems sooner... they seemed pretty convinced that the meds they'll give her for all this will pretty much clear her up, maybe even perk her up enough that she won't need to be hooked up to oxygen tanks 24/7 anymore. For years and years she's been suffering, and with one test they find the root(s) of the problem just like that? I mean, that's good, but... O.o
I suppose it's just because she's been resisting going to the hospital for as long as she possibly could. It took some pretty serious pneumonia and various other evils for her to let them admit her last time, 2 years ago, and this time she put it off until she literally felt like she was about to die. One of her excuses was that, again, she didn't think she was strong enough to handle the test they ran on her today. But the major reason she's been slowly dying is that spoiled brat cousin of mine. Since grandma got custody of her she's been coddling her senseless, and it got to the point where she just won't let the child grow up. She's sixteen and completely dependent on grandma. She can't be in the house alone for even a minute because she hears noises and gets scared. Grandma still has to ask her every other hour if she's used the bathroom recently, remind her to wash her hands when most people her age would do it by common sense, etc. When they gave her an upstairs bedroom to herself last year, they put a baby monitor in there so she could call grandma if she got scared, which meant grandma in her miserable condition had to climb up that flight of stairs, often many times a night, just to coddle her back to sleep. The kid is SIXTEEN.
So long story short, all this time grandma has been letting herself sit and slowly die rather than attempt to make herself better because she's been afraid her household, especially her precious granddaughter, would be unable to function without her there. So she'd rather stay at home through all this now and let her life end years or even months earlier than it would if she'd just go to the hospital for a few days and finally figure out how to fix things. Grandparents... *head implodes*
And I could go into yet another nice long rant about that little sixteen-going-on-nine brat, but I need to finish this week's corners. One line in Bacchus hates me. -.-
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dragged from Becky's stream of consciousness at 2/10/2005 09:17:00 PM
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