In the hospital

Debbie went into the hospital in Danville on Monday night. Over the weekend, she was having even more difficulty walking and communicating. It was suggested by someone that she have another MRI to check to see if there's been growth since last month when we went to get the one done in Charlottesville. She went to the Emergency Room Monday, and they did a CT scan, where they found that there was a great deal of swelling going on in her brain. She is now up to 24mg of Decadron/day (translation A LOT!!) which causes a great amount of swelling in her body but reduces the swelling in her brain. I haven't talked to her. I have talked to my sister, Michelle, my brother, and my dad. Dad said that Debbie did feel better on Tuesday.

On a side note, this is a blessing that she's in the hospital, because Tuesday, there was a HUGE thundestorm that rolled through the area. The south half of the county is without power, including my brother's house since it hit (about 4pm CDT) and won't have any until Friday sometime!! His office and the office where Michelle works is also without power.

To Illinois

Debbie's been at my brother's home in IL now for about 11 days. I think the biggest issue happening at the moment is getting her to take her medicine on time/at fairly regular intervals. While any of us siblings has no problem telling her to do it, my sister-in-law is not yet comfortable telling her what to do when it comes to things that must be done.

She is spending a lot of time in bed, but her physical therapist from Salem anticipated that happening, plus she has always been inclined to veg out a lot, anyway. They do have some home health care involved--mostly for bathing a couple times a week. Because the home health care team is involved, they suggest that she not do a lot of running around while the insurance covers it b/c of the possibility of injury while she is out--if she's at Walmart, gets hurt and an ambulance is involved, the hha can be charged with fraud. It's ALL so complicated--why can't they just let her live her life. I feel like putting these restrictions out there could almost shorten her time. As it is, when she was in the nursing home, she felt like everything was out of control because a lot of the staff at the nursing home wouldn't listen to her input. Several times we had to remind certain staff members "She has a brain tumor, she's not stupid". The feelings of things being out of control does not help her rest and try to get things on track. Even the fact that either she didn't remember or wasn't told about her appointment with her doctor at UVA when I was there really disturbed her, and she told one of the doctors at the clinic that day that she felt like they were hiding things because no one was talking to her directly like they had in the past.