A brief history.

This is adapted from Jessica’s post at http://onestepatatime89.blogspot.com. It explains some of what’s happened in the past two weeks.

This last week has been quite hard on my family. Since last Tuesday,the 17th, we have been at the hospital with my Grandma(Mom’s mom). Grandma was having excruciating pain in her stomach and very weak for quite a few days. We finally got her an appointment to see a doctor after days of her not doing well. We took her to an oncologist(cancer specialist) because we were concerned that the cancer was back. Grandma had a large, cancerous tumor in her eye 2 years ago. That eye was surgically removed and we prayed the cancer was gone for good.

Grandpa, Grandma, Mom, my Aunt, 2 babies and I loaded up into the van and headed to the doctors office to get Grandma checked out. Because Grandma is so weak at this point she can barely walk. We wheel her into the doctors office in a wheel chair. Keep this in mind, Grandma is young. She just turned 58 on the 14th. She dances competitively and is just a go getter. Seeing her this weak and in this much pain has been hard.

The doctor orders a few tests for her to have up at the hospital. We load back into the van and head to the hospital. They check her liver, blood and do a couple other simple tests. After the tests are finished they send us home to wait for results. We head back to my Grandparents house, get Grandma settled in and not even 10 minutes later we get a phone call from the doctor. Grandma gets off the phone and says “I need blood. I have half the amount I’m supposed to have.” As soon as we hear this, we rush off to the hospital to have a blood transfusion.

That’s where we are today. Grandma has been bleeding internally in her liver for days and it got really bad on Friday night. Early Saturday morning Grandma was rushed into a procedure to stop the bleeding in order to save her life. There were several ways she could have died but God kept her alive. Our family was in the waiting room for an hour plus waiting to hear if she was okay. A surgeon finally came out and told us she was stable.

As of right now, Grandma is in ICU. She’s on a ventilator which helped saved her life yesterday. If she wouldn’t have been on it she wouldn’t have been able to breathe on her own. Today she is down to 40% oxygen as opposed to 100% where she was yesterday. She can’t talk to us because of ventilator. If we talk to her her blood pressure goes down. Nurses say it’s because she wants to talk to us but can’t. =( Her hands are tied down to bed so that she won’t try to tear the machine off. She’s on something they call “milk amnesia”. It gives her short term memory loss so that she won’t remember things happening right now. They still aren’t positive that they stopped the bleeding but from tests being run(almost every 6 hours) it sounds like it has been.

We still don’t know what caused the bleeding to start in the first place. Usually this kind of bleed happens because of trauma or cancer/tumors. They haven’t been able to do the right tests to find out what caused the bleeding yet. That’s because Grandma hasn’t been stable enough for the kind of tests they need to do. Her liver, kidneys and lungs aren’t good. A doctor yesterday told us the only thing that’s good right now is her heart and her faith.