As of today, my mom has been in the ICU for three weeks. Right now I am in a state where I just want to say everything, so I am going to. Please do not leave comments. I don't want any of that. I just want to get this stuff out of my head, through my fingers and out into the world.

Three weeks ago, she went into the hospital for what is known as a 'stress test.' She had been having trouble with extreme fatigue and chronic bronchitis for a long time. After lots of other theories, her doctor thought that perhaps she had a heart problem, hence the test. During the test, they make you walk on a treadmill while connected to an EKG. The idea is to monitor your heart while it is working hard. After three minutes, her heart rate shot up to 260. If that means nothing to you, realize that at that rate, the heart is beating over 4 times per second. Luckily, this happened in a hospital, while being monitored.

An angiogram discovered three blocked vessels in her heart. They tried angioplasty--where they go in with a balloon and attempt to expand the vessels without surgery, but no dice. She needed a bypass.

The bypass went fine. However, there were two complications. 1) It did not fix the excessive heart rate--this was due to an additional problem. 2) She developed severe pneumonia.

The pneumonia was/is resistant to antibiotics. On top of that, she developed a very serious staph infection. For all this time, she has not been able to breathe on her own. Which means she has a tube down her throat, which means she can't talk. It is very uncomfortable, so she has been heavily drugged.

When they did the bypass, they used arteries from her chest to reroute the vessels in her heart. This caused a complication which happens with about 10% of bypass surgeries. See, when they do a bypass, they have to cut through a lot of bone. That bone has to be wired back together. Well, the arteries they use for the bypass feed those bones with blood. But since the arteries aren't there, the bones weaken. Sometimes they die. The dead bones, combined with the constant coughing from the pneumonia, caused the wires to rip though the bones, shredding them and exposing her heart below. Literally, it was wound, nothing, heart. Here's the understatement of the century: That is very dangerous, not to mention painful. So, she had to have another surgery to remove the dead bone, and take muscles from her chest and relocate them across the wound so there was something between her heart and the open air besides loosely stitched skin. This happened Monday. And all of this does not even take into account the fact that she will have to have another surgery to implant a device to regulate her heart. Sometime in the future, after recovery from this surgery and the pneumonia and staph infection.

There are many people I really care about who read this site, and some of those people smoke. I know. I know. This is "uncool" and I hate to sound like a public service announcement, but I beg you to stop. My mom quit seven years ago, but it seems that that only bought her a few years of health. This bed, these tubes, this extreme pain--this is where you are headed, and I don't want to see you in a bed suffering like this. Not that I will even be allowed in the vicinity; in most of the cases, as you are not my immediate family. Let's hope you have people like my sisters who will be there constantly for you, otherwise, you will lay there alone, in pain, terrified. This is what my mom does anyway, but she does have people coming in to comfort her, at least.

So. This brings us to yesterday. Yesterday I visited in the morning, and everything was fine. I left around noon, with a plan. Today I had the day off from work, and my plan was to do absolutely nothing. I wanted to enjoy not working, and to avoid the hospital and all its bleak news. I wanted to surf the internet, work in my yard, and watch junk TV. All of which I did. Then I got a phone call.

It seems that after I left yesterday, they attempted some kind of procedure. I don't know what it was, some readjustment of one of the multitude of tubes running into her body. Anyhow, my dad went in afterwards and found no one in sight. Not only that, but there was blood all over the floor, dirty rags and dirty hospital gowns strewn about. It smelled. The tape securing the tube to my mom's mouth was filthy, covered with blood and crust. They had apparently spilled some of her "food" (which is injected through a tube that runs into her stomach through her nose) and that was not cleaned up either.

My dad was enraged. He got my aunt and they complained. They were told that it would be cleaned up soon. It wasn't.

They filed a formal complaint, and got the attention of *someone* I am not sure who. There has been a lot to complain about. The doctors almost never tell us what they are doing. We sit in the waiting room all day every day, and sometimes we are told that one of the doctors is going to come to speak with us, and sometimes they actually do this, but sometimes they just never appear. Sometimes we hear rumors about possible procedures, repeated as though they are a done deal. There is a lot of misinformation. Most of the nurses are absolute saints, but one or two of them obviously (and when I say obviously, I mean obviously) view this as simply a job.

I think it's a bad sign when her regular doctor, the person who assigned the stress test to begin with, has been pretty much completely absent as far as family contact is concerned. After all, it's not like my mom is capable of making decisions right now. She's been pumped full of morphine for three weeks. She admitted to me after the first week that she didn't remember any of it.

So tomorrow morning, we are having a conference with the staff to find out exactly what is going on. We have been advised not to allow them to leave until we understand absolutely everything.

What gets me is that whenever I think it is finally OK to just breathe easy a little bit, there is yet another setback. For the first two weeks, I felt so anxious it was like my throat was closing. Then I just got depressed. Now I am angry. I am so sick of this I want to scream.

The thing is, what do I have to complain about, really? I'm not laying in there suffering. The only part I have to play in all this is to worry and hope.

Once again, please don't comment. I'm not looking for sympathy. I just want to dump this stuff on the world in general, being as that I've dumped too much on the people who mean the most to me.

Y'know ... no one ever talks about this really. You don't see this stuff on TV or in movies. It's all really easy and/or dramatic in the media. But (and I hate to say this) this is what happens to people. It's too awful to even discuss, apparently.
--------