Urgent admission to the hospital this morning

Dad was half-joking this afternoon when I was talking to him from his hospital bed at Methodist that he needed to do something to spice up the blog posts a bit. I told him this wasn't necessary to go this far.

Let me take you back a few days.

Dad has been increasingly unsteady on his feet, often bumping into walls as he starts to lose his balance. His strength is not very good right now, so the ability to correct when he starts to lean to the left isn't there, so the wall or a door jam stops his fall. He has hit his noggin a few times pretty hard (remember, he has a field cut in his vision out of the left eye, so he really can't "see" the door jam or the wall to try and catch himself), and he's all beaten up on the left side with bruises and small cuts from falling.

I guess things were pretty bad yesterday, with walking getting more and more unsteady. They got some labs (which showed very low anti-seizure medication levels, and he did have a seizure on the way into the hospital this morning, but I get ahead of myself). Tracy noticed that his left side was drooping a bit, and the nurse practitioner did an evaluation on him for a possible stroke. The fact that he could lift both of his eyebrows and passed "most" of the tests, they didn't do further testing.

Fast forward to last night at midnight, Dad fell in the hallway. Not having any leg strength to speak of at all, Mom called Rich to come over and help get Dad up and back to bed. Stern warnings to Dad to not try and get up on his own, as even having a walker by his bed doesn't help as his arm strength really isn't much. Well, Dad had to get up to use the bathroom around 4:30 or 5, and this time he fell in the bathroom, hit the counter above his eye, and it required a 911-call to have the professionals help get him up and back to bed.

When I called early this morning, they were in the car on the way to the hospital. Dad's whole left side was pretty much dragging and required two people to get him to the car. The doctors had called ahead and he went straight to admissions and his room. They ordered a CT scan to rule out a bleed in the brain caused by the falls/hitting his head, and to give him a high dose of IV steroids to pump up his strength a bit.

Well, sure enough, there's bleeding in the brain, and they felt it was from the primary hit a few nights ago, and piled on by the falls last night. At first they were going to do surgery right away, but now they want to wait and just see. He's been on blood thinners, so they're giving him a few units of plasma/platelets and some vitamin K to thicken up the blood a little, hoping this will clot on its own. He had lunch, but that's it until probably tomorrow sometime so that if things worsen they can take him into surgery with the smallest risk possible. He is slurring his speech some, and apparently his left side is pretty impacted. Hopefully that is reversed with the steroids and the reduction of the size of the blood clot in the cavity where he had the necrosis removed in the surgery in May.

He did have an MRI as well to determine the level of swelling from the necrosis, but the only report we've received is that it showed that there was not an immediate need for surgery, and that they would monitor closely over the night and into the morning.

Mom is staying the night up there tonight to keep a close eye (no beds on the neuro or ICU that Dad could move to), so hopefully there's some sleep for them both after a rough couple of days.

Dad is keeping his sense of humor somewhat - he told me today that when he gets out of the hospital, he's going to start wearing a helmet around the house. Probably not a bad idea considering the past few days.

I'll keep the blog up to date as we know more. I'm on stand-by to head home any day this week, but for now keeping my ticket to fly home on Saturday. For now, he's "stable" per the medical staff. An interesting few days ahead await.