|
January 18, 2003-7:58 p.m. I was sitting at my desk late Thursday afternoon when the phone rang. We have caller id on our phones so I immediately recognized my home phone number on the display and picked up the phone, �Yes?� �Hello Sa. This is your mother. [like I didn�t already recognize her voice] Bubba is in ICU. They aren�t sure if it�s pneumonia or his heart. I�m going to go down to the hospital and look at him one more time so when you call to tell me you are leaving work, I won�t be here.� �I�m leaving now.� Could she not have said, �. . . look at him one more time. . .�? I called one of my sisters and told her to call the rest of them. My poor brother is cursed with being the only boy out of five children. He had evidently been to the ER four times in the last two weeks complaining of coughing and inability to catch his breath. The first time they diagnosed him with sinusitis and gave him antibiotics. When he failed to improve, he went back to the ER and was diagnosed with pneumonia. He doesn�t have insurance so they didn�t admit him but gave him more antibiotics and sent him home. Again after no improvement, he returned to the ER and was this time diagnosed with double pneumonia. They gave him even stronger antibiotics and again sent him home. He woke up in the wee hours on Thursday coughing and unable to catch his breath. My sister-in-law got him dressed and again took him to the ER. I guess it was pretty evident to the staff this time that he was seriously ill. His blood pressure was way up and they gave him too much medication, which caused his blood pressure to go way down. Also for the first time in his four emergency room trips, they did an EKG and discovered that his heart was weak. We were told that this weakness may have been caused by the pneumonia and that they were doing more tests. He�s only thirty-nine years old so that sounded plausible to us. They told us that they would do a chemical stress test on his heart on Monday and based upon the results of that, determine if he would be transferred to a hospital in Dallas. He will stay in the ICU until they do the testing. His regular doctor came in and said that he would be transferred on Monday. When my sister-in-law said that the cardiologist had said they were doing the test on Monday, he backed down saying they must have changed their minds. This morning when the covering doctor was making her rounds, she told Bubba that he had indeed had a heart attack and that it was in his chart that he had had a heart attack. Mom, Daddy and I spent a good bit of the day there yesterday and Mom and I were there most of the day today. My sister-in-law is understandably a basket case. We are all just waiting until they do the test on Monday to find out where we go from here. **Disclaimer: All characters in this diary are fictional. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, real or imagined, is purely coincidental and unintentional.** |
