RENAISSANCE - Post Brain Haemorrhage

It first happened around the third or fourth day after our father was shifted to the ward from three weeks in the ICU.   His usual languid right side, would stiffen up, his right arm all clenched would move to his chest, his facial expression would be that of a person in utmost pain and breathing would be heavy, noisy and rapid.   It was scary to say the least, to watch him have this episode all of a sudden when he was asleep peacefully.   This would recur – sometimes every time 10 minutes, sometimes every half hour and on real fun days every 5 minutes.  The first night it happened, he was moved back to ICU for observation.  Nothing particularly seemed amiss, he was wheeled back to the room next morning.  In our five month stay at the hospital, this happened every so very often.    Some said our father was getting emotional.   Emotional?  So timed, every 10 minutes emotional?  Nah.   He was give...

It was an all nighter of heavy breathing on the first night at home.  A night to remember.  A new fumbling bumbling nurse, father breathing like he was possessed, and me just watched them with exhaustion all night.   And there, it stopped in the morning.   After a couple of days of just watching him obsessively, figured he breathed so when passing urine.   However did not know if the heavy breathing caused him to pass urine, or passing urine caused him to breath rapidly.   All I knew was they were connected.   Since IMC was usually done first thing in the morning, there was no frequent heavy breathing during the day.   Ha, there, the explanation why the episodes occurred mostly during the night.   It was because there was so much urine retention in the night and he was struggling to pass it and hence the frequency.  But why was the interval between so timed, I still do not know. So we then started hi...

Unable to bear our father’s suffering any longer, we circumvented the experts and tried inserting a catheter anyway.  It was highly uncomfortable for our father, he started to bleed and few blood clots came out.   It scared us sufficiently, pulled out the experimental catheter.   It must’ve been the wounds from the regular IMC that caused the bleed. Not knowing the next steps, we waited for the wounds to heal – just miraculously. Complications Due to IMC   Source:   http://www.manfredsauer.co.uk/iqcath.asp After maybe like a week or two, my sister was at the temple for a special prayer session and I was rushing out for a meeting.  I would’ve been out of the door in a minute, but our nurse came running to tell me that our father was shivering and had temperature.  Having known the drill of infection, I knew what it was.  Unable to cancel the meeting at the last minute and not wanting to disturb my sister during her prayer, I told...

Although our father could swallow food in small quantities, he was mainly fed through the ryles tube.  With repeated episodes of him yanking it out due to discomfort and given his chronic cold, we were advised to have a PEG tube inserted in his stomach.    Apparently ryles tube is a temporary solution, not recommended for more than couple of months, if even that.   So we decided to have the PEG in place.  It's a fairly simple procedure, does not take more than 20 minutes.    There was a gastroenterologist in our hospital, whom I will hence forth refer to as Dr. G.  He seemed friendly and we zeroed on him to perform the procedure.  Dr. G, recommended that we get our father admitted a day before the procedure, then stay for another couple of days to monitor him.   Although the expenses for such a stay at this corporate hospital seemed daunting, we opted for it given it was for the greater good! Incidentally in Jul...

This is the second birthday for our father since the stoke.   For the first one we were still at the hospital.  Coincidentally some of his friends showed up the hospital, the staff had arranged for a cake, apart from which I had picked up a cake and some decorations.  So his hospital room was full of nurses, duty doctors, cleaning staff, family, friends and two cakes.   He wasn’t too alert, seemed like he knew something was up, we couldn’t tell for sure if he really understood.  This January 4 th was different.   There was just one cake and the room was decorated by our driver under the supervision of our nurse.  My sister and I put some balloons up and our physiotherapist showed up as we were getting ready to cut the cake.   A dear cousin sent a bouquet of red roses.   Our father looked around the room in amusement, cut the cake with enthusiasm and gave us a piece each.  A Happy birthday indeed.  

I love this picture of brain from the National Geographic. Read this piece on brain by them  Brain, Brain Information, Facts, News, Photos -- National Geographic .  Lovely interactive pictures.   While looking at the pictures, remember that it is our father's left fronto-parieto-temporal lobe which is affected.  So was his ganglio-capsular region , but this cannot be seen in the picture. Excerpt from the piece - "Making sense of the brain's mind-boggling complexity isn't easy. What we do know is that it's the organ that makes us human, giving people the capacity for art, language, moral judgments, and rational thought. It's also responsible for each individual's personality, memories, movements, and how we sense the world. All this comes from a jellylike mass of fat and protein weighing about 3 pounds (1.4 kilograms). It is, nevertheless, one of the body's biggest organs, consisting of some 100 billion nerve cells that not only put togethe...

It was five days to go for Deepavali, our biggest festival.   It was the usual busy day, went to the Siddha hospital for a treatment in the morning, followed by physiotherapy, then some cleaning and we were resting for a bit around 4:30 PM when our nurse practically burst into our room saying something seems amiss with our father.  He was shivering like he was out in the snow with summer clothes on and had goose bumps all over.   The temperature reading showed nothing alarming.   I had seen him like this once before in the hospital when he developed sudden shivers and our surgeon mentioned it was a sign of urinary infection.    I was sure it was matter of time before his temperature shoot up.  It did, in the next 30 minutes.   The reading was 104 degrees.   This wasn’t neither unexpected nor were we unprepared.  Since we knew the bacterium Klebsiella Pneumoniae was happily residing in his urinary tract in larg...