My mom's ordeal

Mom has had intestinal bleeds before (3) that put her in the hospital and forced her to receive blood transfusions. They never could find the specific site of the bleeds. 15 years ago she a gastric bypass, so it has always been blamed on that- maybe something wasn’t put back together exactly as necessary or a spot was weakened. It still could be that, but it also might be that there is something more to it than that.

Any way with this episode: Last Sunday very early in the morning she became very ill and was in a tremendous amount of pain and vomiting and so on. My mom and dad were visiting my sister in Northern Virginia, so they took mom to the nearest naval hospital in Bethesda Maryland. When mom got there they said that her liver enzymes were up and treated her as though she was an alcoholic. ( the doctor came in and asked her not weather she drank, but how much she drank, and rolled his eyes when she said “none.”- likely because of the liver enzymes).

She told the doctor to do a CT scan because she was throwing up bile- which to her ( a nurse) indicated that her waste was not moving out the proper end. The doctor told her that they needed to prioritize and her liver was more important. They did a few tests, admitted her, left her writhing in pain for a couple of day and finally did the CT scan at 1 in the morning on Wednesday. At 4am Wednesday there were opening her up. On an endoscopy earlier that day, they saw that her intestines had ceased all movement. The CT scan showed that part of her bowel had folded over on itself.

When they opened her up, they found that a big chunk of her intestine was dead. When it died and was not addressed quickly, the bowl around it continued to attempt to move things and because of the way it moves was pushing back on itself, and probably caused the collapse. They had to remove a significant amount of her intestine.

So they found the problems, but the white blood cell count stayed high, fevers kept happening, etc. She otherwise was appearing to heal. They let her start consuming some liquid diet food. Then her would became infected and they removed her staples and put in the contraption that was supposed to suck out the infection. I have pictures of the wound- it’s huge and kind of gross, but if your one for medical stuff- let me know and I’ll share.

Things started looking up and she was moving around and absolutely loving Jello and tea. This morning they told her and my father that they were going to try to stitch back up the wound another way and took her to the OR to do it to allow “ease of her discomfort” under a bit of anaesthesia. ( Like I said- big gaping wound). Apparently when they go in there, they found trouble.

There was a tremendous amount of infection, the food that she had been consuming was leaking out of her intestine into her abdominal cavity, and things looked bad. They cleaned the whole thing out, made a bigger wound, removed more intestine, and left it open. They have her sedated and are keeping her in ICU because of the open wound. She will go back under the knife on Friday to see if they can start her up again.

This has been such a roller coaster and is so crazy it’s unbelievable. The saddest part of all of this is that we believe that, even though she still would have been sick, if that doctor had just listened to her last Sunday, this ordeal would not have been anywhere NEAR what it has. That time period was likely when most of this damage was occurring. If I ever see that doc, I might just have a few choice words.