My wife almost died early this year from a hospital deciding to rush her Sodium level restoration because beds were scarce and profitable. She now suffers from extreme anxiety, her previous life as a happy, well-balanced mom is over, and as I write, she’s in the next room chattering in nonsense to herself because it’s how her brain copes. It’s worse in the mornings, gets better, briefly, in the afternoons as she gains more higher-level function, until her loss and grief for that overwhelm her, and she reverts again.
I won’t go into the litany of pain and suffering she continues to go through, suffice it to say she has had a variety of terrible-to-observe, worse to endure, symptoms throughout the year. Screaming in agony for hours, in first or third person, in hospital or at home, when painkillers just don’t work is not an experience anyone should go through.
The highlight of today is that a friend has invited us around for an Xmas meal. It’ll be our first social engagement since it happened, so there’s some risk. It’s at 4pm, which is usually her best time of the day, so we’re hopeful things can play out “normally”. I guess we’ll see, sometimes you have to risk things, just to make progress. I don’t think my friend actually realises just how much it means to us what his family have done, but I am so grateful that I cried on getting the invite. It can be hard to struggle alone.
So again, take heart. There is always something worse that could have happened, even for us. Don’t let the past dictate the future - you can’t change the past, but you can influence the future.
And I will join you in hoping that next year will be better.
[edit: thank you all for the kind wishes. Xmas has been hard so far because the sense of loss she feels is so much stronger than normal, but we live in hope]
That sounds awful, I’m so sorry to hear that and do hope that she can make progress.
If I may, this is a point I’ve been thinking a lot of lately though - as in, is the “oh there’s many people out there who have it way worse, so be thankful for what you have” mindset actually healthy?
Of course there will always be others worse off… and the inverse advice is also widely accepted: “never be the smartest person in the room”, “always look up, not down, to grow”, etc
I’ve been processing this in the context that I’m on the cusp of needing to give up on some life dreams, at least for a long while.
I’m glad to be shut down if this isn’t the right place for this discussion
I’m not going to shut you down. I’m just going to say that when things are truly bad, you need something to cling onto. When hope is crushed, over and over; when the light at the end of the tunnel is in fact an oncoming train that will also kill you if you fail to dodge; when your view on life turns to thoughts like “is it even worth it ?”, in these sorts of situation, realizing that life could in fact be worse, that you have something to be grateful for can be a crucial life-line to someone who thought they had none left.
Is it healthy for a person living under normal circumstance ? Probably not. Is it useful for someone in extremis? From personal anecdote only, I would say so. YMMV.
Disclaimer: I am not a medical doctor. This is my understanding.
You need a certain level of sodium in you - typically around 135-145 mEq/L. The body expects this level in a similar fashion to the way it expects a certain temperature, it’s where it works best and as you go farther away from this optimal value, the body starts to suffer. My wife’s level was 121.
In fact the body can manage reasonably well over a wider range, as long as the value changes slowly, slowly because the level of sodium controls, via osmotic potential, transport across the blood/brain barrier.
So the hospital should have added a maximum of 6-8 mEq/L per day into my wife’s bloodstream via intravenous saline. That would have given her body time to adjust, slowly, to the new sodium concentrations. Instead they initially gave her 13 mEq/L in 12 hours, and then another 6 mEq/L in the next 12 hours, by their own test results. She went clinically non-responsive (ie: near-comatose) for 2 days after they did that.
Sudden sodium changes can result in edema (which can be fatal) or osmotic demyelination - the myelin sheath being a wrapper around nerve cells that allows rapid electrical transmission from nerve to synapse. Losing the myelin is “a bad thing”, see Parkinson’s Disease, Multiple Sclerosis etc.
She woke up after they tried to “reboot her brain” and gave her Prozac, then discharged her because she could “walk” with a walker for help. They subsequently put her on benzodiazaprenes in the (9? I lose track) times we came back to ER over the next month or so. She’s still struggling to get off those, though she has halved the dose they prescribed (1mg Ativan every 4 hours).
We can’t even sue the hospital, because we spent the last 9 months trying desperately to figure out what went wrong and if it can be fixed, and we only got 6 months to file any dispute because it’s a county hospital. I spell it out as simply as I can above, but finding out what went wrong was a gradual thing. We have appealed this, but I don’t hold out much hope.
All told, I am singularly unimpressed with the American “healthcare” system to date.
I'm sorry that your wife, and you, have had this in your lives. I hope that today was good for you both and that the coming year brings better health for her.
Merry Christmas and thanks for an inspiring story. I have been through so much chaos, struggles in 2023, but comparing to you, it is just nothing.
I will forever take heart gratefully in whicheve life will hit me at.
Hope things will get better with your wife and you, I guess it could only be better from here.
Thanks, you made my day and best wishes to you from Vietnam
My wife almost died early this year from a hospital deciding to rush her Sodium level restoration because beds were scarce and profitable. She now suffers from extreme anxiety, her previous life as a happy, well-balanced mom is over, and as I write, she’s in the next room chattering in nonsense to herself because it’s how her brain copes. It’s worse in the mornings, gets better, briefly, in the afternoons as she gains more higher-level function, until her loss and grief for that overwhelm her, and she reverts again.
I won’t go into the litany of pain and suffering she continues to go through, suffice it to say she has had a variety of terrible-to-observe, worse to endure, symptoms throughout the year. Screaming in agony for hours, in first or third person, in hospital or at home, when painkillers just don’t work is not an experience anyone should go through.
The highlight of today is that a friend has invited us around for an Xmas meal. It’ll be our first social engagement since it happened, so there’s some risk. It’s at 4pm, which is usually her best time of the day, so we’re hopeful things can play out “normally”. I guess we’ll see, sometimes you have to risk things, just to make progress. I don’t think my friend actually realises just how much it means to us what his family have done, but I am so grateful that I cried on getting the invite. It can be hard to struggle alone.
So again, take heart. There is always something worse that could have happened, even for us. Don’t let the past dictate the future - you can’t change the past, but you can influence the future.
And I will join you in hoping that next year will be better.
[edit: thank you all for the kind wishes. Xmas has been hard so far because the sense of loss she feels is so much stronger than normal, but we live in hope]