Wacky Wednesday

Yesterday, I spent pretty much the whole day with mom at the clinic and hospital. She was carrying a low-grade fever for 3-4 days with occasional spikes here and there of 101. I was watching her closely, and trying really hard to break it with Tylenol but it kept lingering. It also concerned me that she had a bad cough which made her very breathless. We were scheduled to go in for our weekly labs later in the afternoon but my gut told me to call the clinic and tell them what's been happening.

I spoke with Dr. A's nurse who told me that we should come in sooner to have mom meet with the nurse practitioner to see what's going on. They said it's possible that mom could have an infection which I assumed was the case by the persistent fever. I pretty much dropped everything I was doing at work and went to take her to the clinic. Once we arrived and met with the NP, she examined mom's chest and heard mom's left side of her lung was a bit quieter. The NP said she'd like us to do a chest x-ray because it might be early forms of pneumonia and if it was it would mean mom would have to get admitted in the hospital.

But before that, we were whisked away to one of those sterile isolation rooms that I've only seen in the movies. Since mom's counts were borderline low (WBC 1.7), they did not want to risk her catching an infection. She was given a slew of medications via infusions to control her fever, nausea, dehydration and some potent anti-biotics in case that there was an infection. It took about three hours. After that, she started to feel a bit better. We then rushed over to the hospital to make our chest xray appt.  By the time, we got home, I noticed mom was feeling the worlds better. Her once consistent fever at 100.0 was now back to 98s. Yay meds! Now all I hoped for was her chest xray results to be ok.

Update 11/8/12 : Got a call from the NP today and mom's chest xray is ok. She said there doesn't seem to be a serious concern. Mom's chest has some liquid in it and we'd monitor it for now.

It's strange...as all this was unfolding yesterday I really wasn't phased at all. I remember months ago when things on the fly would happen, I'd kinda freak out and get anxiety. But I've noticed recently, I just deal with it. The good, the bad..all of it.  It doesn't affect me like it once did.  When I get bad news, though disappointing, I don't get so emotional vested anymore. I just take the next steps I need to.