Good morning…
Many of you continue to ask about my mom’s condition since last week’s post My Mom Is In The ICU. Together as a written word community we have experienced the potent power of prayer. Connected to tons of life-saving machines, there was no medical explanation for my mother opening her eyes to greet the sound of my father’s familiar voice. The spiritual explanation is that Jesus prayed for us while we waited and wondered, and the LORD chose to bring my mom back to conscious awareness. Yet when I wrote to you about her last, I was worried about her confusion and agitated thinking when she was taken off the ventilator. Would our mom ever return to us fully herself?
So many of you wrote to me or told me personally about a common condition called “ICU psychosis” or “hospital induced psychosis.” You shared story after story of loved ones who did and said crazy, concerning things in the ICU, a disorientation that had you similarly worried. Being away from family, friends, and the familiar comforts of home. Sleep disturbance and deprivation. No reference to day or night. A patient’s loss of time and date. Their body processing so many strong drugs. Hospital staff constantly checking the patient’s vital signs. The noisy monitoring devices can be disturbing. All of these discombobulating conditions often cause signs of temporary delirium. Yet so many of you said that once your patient was released from the ICU, and then from the hospital, these worrisome symptoms subsided and your loved one eventually returned to their active, vibrant lives. I am so grateful for your honest sharing, it strengthened my sense of hope.
In these days that followed, my mom made steady progress. She began eating soft foods, first fed by others and she now feeds herself. She was unhooked from the life saving devices and now, breathing on her own, she has four treatments a day to clear up her pneumonia. She was moved from the ICU to a regular hospital room. Her energy level continues to increase. She has endured test after test after test on her brain, on her heart, on her major organs.
What we have discovered is this. Along with the life-threatening infection that ravaged her body, my mom suffered a small stroke, likely on my 59th birthday. The stroke is impacting my mom’s speech, cognition, and sight in her right eye. With ongoing speech therapy, along with her physical and occupational therapy, we expect many of these current limitations to be reversed over time.
I left Ohio last Tuesday night and, spurred by the Spirit, on Wednesday I crafted a text. “I love you dad and I miss being with you this morning. To save time in your day, I am wondering if we could set up a four way call with Andy (my brother) and Cathy (my sister) each night for a while so that together we can verbally unpack mom’s progress each day. Would you be interested in this possibility?”
After receiving his response, “Sounds good,” I reached out to my siblings, and my brother has begun emailing us each a Zoom link. Now we text about our mom’s progress throughout the day and Zoom on given nights. My mom even joined us on the screen yesterday from her hospital room. How amazing it was to see the light back in her eyes and to hear the sweet sound of her familiar voice! Technology is such a connecting gift.
Her progress is predicted to be slow and steady, which reminds me of the quote my sister discovered the day our mom miraculously opened her eyes.
“By perseverance the snail reached the ark,” writes Charles Spurgeon.
By perseverance and the power of prayer we hope our mother will soon return to the skilled nursing unit at the Renaissance, my parents’ senior living community in Ohio. Eventually, God willing, she will join my dad in their cozy villa. I am grateful that more time on earth with my mom is the gracious choice of our loving God.
I thank each of you for your continued prayers. What a blessing you are to me and our family during this tumultuous time.
“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’” (Acts 17:24-28, NIV).
…Sue…
