It may be time.....

I'm fairly certain that I haven't posted about mom's latest trip to the hospital yet. There are likely a few reasons for this: 1.)I've posted very little about anything lately, and 2.)It is much easier to post about silly, flippant things than about the in depth things tied in to emotion. Still, I'm endeavoring once again to try and post more regularly. This is big news too, so it's likely a good thing to write about. So we started mom on Razydyne. Twice, actually. We've taken mom back off Razydyne. Twice actually. The first time we put her on it (both times actually but it was less scary the second time) she complained of her chest feeling funny about two days in. The day after she began it she complained of chest pain, but bubs figured that it was gas. The next morning she was sitting on her bed saying she felt funny, and pointing to her chest when he asked where. (Do you know the stress by the way, of trying to figure out if someone is sick enough to worry over, when that someone has trouble verbalizing pain and feelings, and often complains of pain regularly.) That afternoon, when he told me she was complaining of her arm hurting, (at some point he told me it was numb as well) I called the doctor, who told me essentially to take her to the closest emergency room. So he drove her to the hospital, and i drove myself to meet them, on rural windy roads, probably faster than i ought. The nursing staff at one of our two county hospitals are wonderful. The one put us in an empty room with chairs and a television, while we waited for the doctor. She thought it might be easier for mom than lying on the bed in the emergency room. Another printed out word finds for her to do, when we mentioned that she loved them. In fact, the entire experience was going really well (so far as an er visit goes) until about the time the doctor walked in. At about that time momma had had it. Her arm was still hurting her very badly, and she was reaching her limit of patience. So when the dr. came in, he had a foreign name and she started mimicking his accent. She wasn't being out of control, she wasn't screaming or running, she wasn't throwing anything or hitting him, she wasn't swearing at him or threatening him, she was simply repeating his name over and over in a mimicked accent. It was rude of her to make fun of him that way, but in her defense she was in a hospital in what was obviously somewhat severe pain after waiting for a while and she. had. had. enough. Given that and her medical condition, i would actually say she was comporting herself rather well. We told her to stop, but the doctor waved us off, leading me to think that perhaps he was understanding. He stopped examining her, and this is where he annoyed me. First, he asked me if we had ever had her worked up for dementia. Now, he could have meant a formal workup, but there is a certain amount of temptation attached to that question to reply thus: "No, you mean she might have dementia? That never occurred to me." Instead, i responded that yes we had taken her to a neurologist, and that was why she was on Namenda (or something like that). He had diagnosed her with Alzheimers. Here he went off on a tangent, how he was a geriatrician and thought she had frontotemporal lobe dementia due to her behavior. He kept harping on the behavior issue, on the fact that there were behavior issues with that type of dementia. And.then.he.offered.me.antipsychotics. If you haven't been reading these blogs right along you may not know my soapbox on antipsychotics. So let me try to only speak on this briefly. Let me get this straight, i know you mean well doctor and i appreciate you telling me that there is nothing serious with my mom, but you are suggesting to me that i give my mother an anti-psychotic, when such drugs have an fda black box warning due to being contraindicated for elderly patients with dementia, due to an increased risk of death, so you are offering me a potentially dangerous drug, to control behavior problems, which were not bad in front of you, and which i had not complained about. Also, he never told me what was wrong with her. Here's the blessing to the story. When i later took her to her doctor (whom i love and whose nursing staff i love) i told her this story. She responded that we knew mom had frontotemporal lobe dementia. (This i hadn't known.) However, this, according to her description, is treated the same way, but declines slower. So this was a really long way of saying that mom doesn't have alzheimers. This is good news. Praise God for good news!!