It’s been so long since I last blogged …. I am not certain if I lost interest or became to busy, or just a combination of the two. What I do know is that one heck of a lot has happen since last September. So much that I wonder where to start.
Let’s see… In October, Shane’s grandmother died while in hospice. She had been place in the hospital for a few days so that Karen (MIL) could enjoy Scott & Charity’s vow renewals. They were originally married in Las Vegas when they were driving through while he was a trucker. So now 5 years later they had a church ceremony. (Scott is Shane’s older brother.) The day she was due to actually come back to the house is the day she died. While it was hard in some ways I guess it was easier than her coming home and then dieing shortly after.
Then later October, we moved. When I say we, I mean Shane, myself, and unfortunately for my piece of mind his mother. We now live in a duplex in Holmen which as about 2000 sq ft. It’s was two bedrooms on the first floor which his mother has claimed for herself, a finished basement with a family, bath, bed, and laundry rooms as well as another room we’re using for our home office/railroad layout. (The railroad is over the desks and on the all other walls.) I spend most of my time in the basement—that way I don’t have to deal as much with his mother.
In November we had Thanksgiving the same as we did last year, Shane made the family dinner for his family up at his brother’s in Arcadia around 1 pm, and then we stopped at my parents later for pie so we could see my relatives. All in all Thanksgiving, will probably be my last happy holiday for a while. At 3 am on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, I received a phone call from my sister’s fiance. If you’re thinking 3 am is not a good time to get a phone call, you are most correct. What Bob told me was that my mother was being taken by ambulance to the hospital. My father had awoken in the middle of the night to find mom, half sitting on the edge of the bed, breathing funny, and a grayish color to her. When he couldn’t awaken her he called 911. I was awake, dressed and at the hospital within 30 minutes. (Good I think since it’s typically about a 30 minute drive, though the roads were very quite that time of the morning which helped.)
What we found out once we arrived was not good news. Mother had a brain aneurysm which had burst. It was decided that the best course of action for her would be to transfer her to the University Medical Center in Madison, WI. Over the next month we had some things that we slowly encouraging, her waking up from her coma, her coming off the ventilator, her efforts to respond and vocalize, her coming out of Neurological ICU, until the morning of December 20th. That morning when the ward nurse checked on her, she was harder to wake up and her responses were sluggish. They determined that her shunt (to assist with fluid pressure in her brain) had become blocked. So they took her back to surgery to place a drain back in her skull to relieve the immediate pressure and then when she was better they’d redo the tubing for the other shunt.
They were cleaning up after placing the drain, and mother’s blood pressure spiked and couldn’t be controlled. Just like her first surgery when they went to coil her aneurysm. (This means they place many many teeny tiny coils in the aneurysm to stabilize the walls and keep more blood for pooling in it.) The first time she had a massive heart attack on the table so they weren’t able to coil as much of her aneurysm as they had hoped. The intent was once she was better to go back and coil more of it. This time when her blood pressure spiked it caused the aneurysm to re-rupture. Dad, Uncle Archie, Aunt Penny, Aunt Mary Ann, Andrea, Bob and myself were able to arrive in time to say our goodbyes to mother. And we donated her kidneys so in a small way she lives on, but it was not a good day by any means.
After mom went into the hospital, my brother started to have frequent headaches. His doctor wanted to rule out an aneurysm because of mother, but instead he had a small one. Wille’s aneurysm was about 2mm, mom actually had two of them the larger one which had ruptured was 2 cm in size. I hadn’t realized that my mother’s aunt LaVon had an aneurysm which had been treated in the 1970′s. Mother’s grandmother died at 55 in her sleep and her aunt (her mother’s sister) died at 57 in her sleep. (Mom was only 56.) Death was ruled natural causes both times, and neither had an autopsy so there is a possibility that they could have had aneurysms as well. Part of the reason I say all that is because there are types of aneurysms that run in families.
After my brother’s, my sister went out and had a MRI. While the test shows her brain to be “normal” the doctor certainly doesn’t know my sister when her calls her normal. She is definitely an original. While mother had the three highest risk factors: smoker, high blood pressure, and female, it appears that there is the definite possibility that is something I’m need to be concerned about. As soon as I have health insurance again, I will go and have a scan as well.
Currently I work with my husband in our home business, which is internet hosting and programming based. Its only the two of us, and with the price of health insurance for a non-group (typically work related) policy it absolutely outrageous! Without children, we don’t qualify for state assisted family insurance.