Its all about the sodium.
They apparently can tell how much water is in your system by checking the sodium levels. A healthy persons sodium level is 137-145. Last night Paul was admitted to the emergency room with a sodium level of 174. The nursing home called it a "critical" level.
Today Pauls level went down a little bit, the upper 160s, with the help of the IV fluids. Tonight his level is up again, 172, so they bump the fluid intake up just a bit.
Its a dance. Too much fluid too quickly can swell the brain. So it must be eased into the body very gingerly, carefully...all the while checking sodium levels.
I never really thought about it before. There is water in the brain...and when you are severely dehydrated it affects the brain adversely, and brain damage can occur. So we are on a 'wait and see' as to how much this incident affects Paul.
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Have you ever had a toy or something that you really cherished, maybe as a kid?
I had a red pencil box with a map of the world on the cover and pencils and an eraser and sharpener inside. I got it when I was 7. It represented my future; travel, writing, something unknown, it had =magic= ...
Then one day it got a little nick on the side, no problem ..i still loved it. Then one day my grandma got mad at me and threw it on the ground ...The plastic hinges to the lid broke off, snapped. I picked it up and put the stuff back inside but it would never close up again. It would never be the same.
I dont know what happened to the red pencil box but i get a churning in my gut when i think about it. Its long ago gone and still I have a love for it, a very strong feeling in my heart. Did it go away? Or does it live on anyway in the memories of the person it touched....unbroken.
Sent from my iPhone
Things live on...
ReplyDeleteone way or another, everything lives on...
Cindy --
ReplyDeleteI had written a five paragraph comment on your pencil box, about how memories relate to images and what not (and then the internet deleted it, and I just told my brother how pissed off I was that it got vaporized by my browser)
I don't know what to say now, because I sense that something bad is happening in California (I really hope not) but as I have been scanning and preserving all of these slides of my 96 year old grandpa who went away in September, As I scan some of the unknown people and places (some are labeled some are not) I wonder who cares about the "Webster picnic" or about "Ruthie with Nancy in 1954" - I wonder why bother yet I cannot throw them away or not scan them - because they were part of who he was, his life. Your pencil box was part of you, just as your husband is, and all of the memories associated with it and him. Preserve him (in your memory) before he was broken like the pencil box (I think that is where you are going with this). You are right, it did not go away, memories do not go away.
I've been looking at all these old photos, of grandpa, of Rick, the old ones make me smile, some of them I forgot about being taken and what we were doing, I laughed and cried.
My mp3 player is on random, and when my friend Roosevelt Dean comes on the stereo, I don't think of him "sleeping" at his service, I think of him in his house laughing and showing me family photos and awards, telling me to buy an old house in a crappy neighborhood (he was my neighbor too) and fixing up and taking pride in that.
A memory, your memory, is always there, no matter what someone, or some event does to it. I wish I could hug you from some 3,000 miles away. Hold onto your pencil box in whatever form it presents itself to you in.
Pauls sodium went down to 169 at 2am this morning. He seems less agitated and more present in the light of day. I asked him : do you know who i am? And he nodded yes ever so slightly....
ReplyDeleteUpdate 1/29. 12:26pm
ReplyDeletePaul is doingbetter today, his sodium is down to 162...well enough to be transfered to a hospital of his providers/Kaiser. Thats good. Except that hospital is 45 minutes away and I wont be able to be there as much as i have been here, 5 minutes from home.