Long Night

Yesterday my Mother in Law came over to dinner. We grilled out, enjoyed great food, and visited for a while. Things went well. When it started to get late Billy and Andrew left to take her home and I stayed home to clean up the mess. Billy called a little while later and said his mom was not feeling well and was having trouble breathing, I could hear her gasping for breath in the background. He said he was taking her to the hospital. About three miles down the road she was unconscious. He called 911. She was unconscious for around 20 minutes before they got there. All the while my three year old son was witnessing this in the back seat and was freaking out. When I got to the parking lot they met the ambulance in, I saw my little man standing there with his Lightning McQueen pajamas on, no shoes, hair still damp from his bath . He was standing there outside the closed ambulance door with Billy and was scared out of his mind. I took Andrew home with the other kids and Billy followed the ambulance to Rex Hospital. It was a long night for everyone in our household. It took me a long time to calm Andrew and Emily down. Emily was crying and Andrew was..... well he was freaked out. He just kept asking "Is my Granny still alive?" How in the world does my three year old even know what that means. It took me two hours to calm him down enough to get him to sleep. There I was laying in bed with our three precious and innocent children unable to sleep. Billy was sitting at the hospital waiting to hear what was going on. It was going to be a long night full of phone calls.

His mother was having such a hard time breathing that they put her on a ventilator. She was completely unresponsive . When she finally was alert she had no control of her left side. We were told that she had suffered another stroke. They moved her into the ICU and Billy stayed at the hospital. This morning they told him that she had pneumonia and would to stay on the ventilator for a few days. They also said that she had heart damage and had not had a stroke. She now can move her left side. Billy came home, showered, and napped for an hour. When my sister got here we headed up to the hospital. The heart doctor had come by while Billy was gone and we got the report upon our return. They told us that she's suffering from congestive heart failure, has a flutter in her heart rate, and the left side is only functioning at 30 %. She has severe pneumonia and is on the ventilator and a feeding tube. It is so hard for Billy to see her like that. She is so uncomfortable and tries to communicate with us .We can tell she gets frustrated because we can't understand what her hand gestures mean. It's horrible to see and completely frustrating to not know what is going on. One minute we are told one thing and the next something different. We were told that she had had a stroke and the next that she hadn't .It has been a long 24 hours and my husband almost fell asleep at the table tonight. I am really tired and I should be trying to sleep, but I am still so wired from the past day . We will head to the hospital again tomorrow and hopefully will have better news to report.