Sunday Serenity #124 (also Mom's status)

I'm feeling profound relief and gratitude today that Mom's still with us. She gave us quite a scare last night. My sister and I truly thought she was dying in our arms.

The doctor's leading theory is that it was a sudden and profound lowering of her blood pressure due to a confluence of things: she had eaten just before her shower which draws a lot of blood to the digestive track; she had taken her bp med with dinner; she had taken a hot shower; she had riased her arms over her head while shampooing and again while combing her hair at the sink just before the spell came on.

But they kept her overnight last night and again tonight to run more tests. They are concerned there might have been a seizure because of the way I describe how her trembling had gotten jerky just before she passed out.

She feels fine though. She says she is feeling normal and she is acting herself--at least what has become normal in the last several months. Though she has made huge strides in progress since the stroke in November she has not gotten back to the full wattage of her vibrant, perky, chatty self that she was so well know for.

Before last night's incident though she had progressed in large and small ways both in regards to healing of her hip and reacquiring language. In the last month the list of things she started doing again grew by leaps and bounds:

• playing scrabble
• making bread pudding
• peeling potatoes
• folding laundry
• going to the water therapy pool at the Y
• walking with a cane (still with supervision though)
• showering alone (with one of us just outside the door but this will have to be reevaluated I think because what if this had happened while she was in the shower? *shudder*)
• taking phone calls
• initiating phone calls
• going to AARP meetings (she had been president of the local chapter before her fall last November)
• teaching me to crochet again (I'll post about that with pics later this week.)
• doing Find-a-word puzzles
• reading the newspaper, magazines, mail etc
• just last Sunday she went to Portland to spend the day with my brother's family and was planning to repeat that again today (and I was planning to go with but to spend the afternoon at Powell's and then make my Sunday Serenity post all about spending four plus hours in a book store big enough to need a map the size of a poster. *sigh* maybe next Sunday.)