What a Horrible Weekend

About 10 days ago, Mom started complaining of sore throat, aches, fever, etc... Classic flu symptoms. Fast forward several days to Monday. She's been ill and in bed all weekend. Monday night a family friend calls and says that she has gone to the ER, that she's gotten dehydrated and is in a lot of pain from the flu and from coughing. Turns out she also has bronchitis.

Here is the first bump in our story. Mom is allergic to codeine (this I don't know at this point). While she's there, they give her some kind of sedative (don't know what b/c I wasn't there) and several prescriptions. The next morning, I drop her Rx off at Target on my way to work - I barely gave them a passing glance. Mom picked them up herself later that day.

Turns out, they prescribed Pfenigren WITH CODEINE and Vicodin. By Friday, she is having some really weird side effects. Saturday morning (my birthday), I'm feeling pretty rotten from this cough and so I'm planning on staying in bed. She came over and was all shaky and anxious. It was almost like she was having a panic attack. That's when it hit me that she had taken Pfenigren. It's got some really nasty possible side effects and it sent up a big red flag. I told her NOT to take that anymore and to drink LOTS of fluids and try and sleep that off.

By Saturday night, she wasn't any better and was getting, in fact, worse. So, we go back to the ER. It was at this point, during the interview with the triage nurse that I discovered that she was allergic to codeine. They had it on their screen from when she was there Monday night. THEY KNEW SHE WAS ALLERGIC TO CODEINE AND GAVE IT TO HER ANYWAY and she'd been taking it three days. I FLIPPED out. This visit, they gave her Valium and that seemed to settle her down. After a grueling six hour visit to the ER, they sent her home to sleep it off - several more prescriptions in hand to "deal with" the vertigo, dizziness and nausea - one of which being Reglan - which, come to find out, can cause pretty severe tremors... 

She slept all day yesterday but was pretty agitated last night when I went to check on her. She woke up this morning and her tremors were uncontrollable. She drove herself into the ER again (I could have choked her for taking such a stupid risk) and told them NOT to send her home until they'd figured out what this was.

She called me about 3pm and said that they wanted to send her to a PSYCH unit b/c they thought the combination of meds had caused an imbalance in her brain which brought on the anxiety and tremors. I completely vetoed that decision b/c I knew this was a MEDICAL problem; not a psych problem.

I dragged my sick butt out of bed, downed some Tylenol Cough & Sore Throat (best stuff EVER folks), got dressed like I was going to work and headed to battle. They were going to admit her whether they liked it or not and I was ready to fight about it. They broke her now FIX IT DAMN IT.

I told Mother not to let them give her anything else and to not make any more decisions until I got there.

Long story short (too late, I know), they admitted her. At first, the doctor didn't want to give her anything to treat the tremors and said he felt like she was having an onset of a panic disorder.  I had to argue with the neurologist assigned to her that she didn't just SUDDENLY have a nervous breakdown and I wasn't buying a totally coincidental sudden onset of PARKINSON'S symptoms, thank you very much. I told him that frankly I wasn't at all interested in his hesitation to treat my mother as a case of over-medication and I wasn't having it. That it was my job to make sure her care is as thorough and expedient as possible. This neurologist has a very good reputation and I know he knows what he's doing. I also know he didn't want to get involved in a potential situation where he was implicating fault in another doctor for prescribing a drug my mother's chart CLEARLY indicated she's allergic to. I told him that as long as he did his job, he didn't have anything to worry about. Fix it - we'll worry about how this happened later.

He finally agreed to put her on fluids and give her something to combat the tremors. He told the nurse (after I'd left) that he felt her situation was a combination of anxiety and over-medication but that the latter probably triggered the former. I guess it was as much as he was willing to admit.

When I left her an hour ago, she was just about asleep.  They are going to at least keep her overnight, push lots of fluids and keep her medicated to combat the tremors.  I'll go back over there tomorrow but I'm not going to let them get rid of her until these tremors have stopped.  I don't want her at home, alone, if she's still experiencing these symptoms.  NO WAY. 

Ugh. What a horrible weekend.