Third Day in the Hospital

Today in 2014, I visited my mother in the hospital. This hospital stay, which was supposed to be a "day or two" according to the cardiologist, was now into its third day. I wrote, "She smiled. 😊 She's in good shape this morning, except for those durn legs..."

I still have that visual in my head, of me standing at the foot of her bed and asking her if she wanted me to massage her ankles and feet with lotion. That was one of the procedures I learned to handle her edema when taking care of her. I can still see her legs and ankles, all swollen and slightly purple from the fluid retention. Again, when I asked, she said she wasn't in any pain. And, no, she didn't want me to massage her legs. 

She changed her mind later, after the doctor arrived and told her that I should be massaging her ankles and feet at the very least. That's how she rolled, my mother. Not doing anything for herself unless someone in authority told her she should do it.

The edema causes were multiple in my mother. Known a century before as dropsy ("she was a long-sufferer of dropsy"), this medical condition causes the patient to exhibit tight skin, a feeling of heaviness in the area affected, joint stiffness, skin discoloration, and difficulty moving. In my mother's case the edema came from her cancer, of course, but it also came from specific failures wrought by that cancer. Those included heart failure, kidney issues (she only had one kidney, and the previous chemo treatments affected the strength of that organ), liver problems, and some medications. The liver problems stemmed from the advancement of the tumors from her bile duct into her liver. This issue also was the root source of her ever-present jaundice.

Our efforts to stem her jaundice were daily rituals that included cleaning the catheter that was inserted into her bile duct to drain the bile, and to replace the bag that collected that bile. I'll write more about those routines as I come upon those journal entries.

While in the hospital, she was hooked up to various fluids. I don't remember all of them now, but I'm certain one of them was Lasix. She was still receiving small doses of that medication to try to ease the fluid retention. We were never fully successful, as "she was a long-sufferer of dropsy" until her demise.

Photo is from Canva.com.