Categories: uncategorized
Date: 04 September 2007 13:55:34
My mom-in-law cannot remember the worst hours of her recent bout with a TIA. "Transient Ischemic Attack", that is. It looks like a stroke, it manifests like a stroke, it feels like a stroke, but it wears off, leaving little or no apparent effects behind.
She was hospitalized for most of three days, the middle one off at a New Orleans hospital, to see neurologists. There, for something like six hours, my husband had to literally hold her down.
This sweet little Pillsbury Dough Grandma, this angelic pray-er for people, this example of gentle Christian forbearance, spent six solid hours biting her son, punching her son, trying to use parental authority to send him away.
She was recovering already from the visible manifestations of her stroke/TIA, but perhaps her mental clarity (or lack of it) was still a factor. When the docs gave her a sedative to calm her thrashing about (which was mostly her usual "restless leg syndrome"), so they could get a good result from the MRI they needed, it worked very well, knocked her right out, put her right down -- for about 45 seconds.
At that point she woke up in the "cave", the tunnel of the MRI equipment, and went totally bat-poop.
Hubby had *told* them she was claustrophobic.
So he spent the next several hours stopping her from slithering off her bed. (Well, there were rails, I'm sure, so she'd have a hard time getting to the floor foot-first. She'd more likely have hung her legs up in the rails and dived head-first to the floor.) She falls weekly at least, and cannot walk without her walker. Only her well-padded frame, her lifelong love affair with calcium-rich dairy products, and the Lord have kept her 86-year-old bones intact.
They popped a chest-harness restraint on her at first, thinking logically that to restrain her arms and legs would upset her. Well, yeah, it would -- and it did, when they had to go ahead and do that. She had slithered right out of the simple chest harness.
She'd fuss and fight and struggle until exhaustion would claim her -- she'd drop off to sleep in the midst of a sentence, sleep for perhaps a minute, maybe two -- then she'd be right back at it.
Grandpa was there, and my daughter, and I am sure they'd have done whatever was necessary if they'd not had my husband there -- but he took the abuse, being the largest and strongest and most stubborn one present.
Well, the largest and strongest anyway. Grandma, temporarily demented and maybe even psychotic, was the most stubborn.