A Million Miles an Hour

Whew! Whew! Whew!

Thursday night we got a call from Bart’s mom saying that Bart’s sister, Amra, had had a seizure and was up at LDS hospital with a brain tumor. Yup, that is right. I have almost survived a full week of work Ready to see the end of the tunnel and launch myself into the weekend and did we hear you right?!!? Amra is 25 years old. She has had somewhat of a chemically dependent life but still……nobody really expects a call like this. You can’t live a life expecting to get a call like this.
We proceeded to farm our kids out and go up to the hospital. I have to “give props” to LDS hospital. It truly is a nice hospital. It feels……hopeful. It feels…..pulsing with energy. That is a good feeling when you are facing death. Amra was very, very sedated and we learned that she had complained to her boyfriend that her left hand was numb and she couldn’t move it and then she had collapsed into a seizure. After having a similar reaction at being alone with a seizure victim, Jim, her boyfriend, called 911 and got her taken up to the hospital. She then proceeded to have several more seizures in the hospital before they got her medicated. The MRI revealed that she had a mass in her brain. The doctor wanted to get another doctor’s assessment before they removed the mass. Waiting. Waiting until Friday. Friday morning brought more waiting. The doctors both decided that her brain was too traumatized, too nutritionally starved to do invasive surgery. It could wait for a couple of weeks until her brain returned to a more normal state. I didn’t envy her having to think about brain surgery for a week or two.
However, that was not to be. Amra had lost the use and feeling of her left arm and some of her left leg from the seizure. This was according to the doctors. When she did not start regaining that usage back they became more concerned and did another MRI. Friday afternoon after Ryan’s soccer game, we were informed that Amra was in emergency surgery. Her mass was hemorrhaging. They could not afford to wait.
2 a.m. Saturday morning the surgery was finished. Now we were informed that there had been no mass. She had had a blood vessel closure in her brain. They now called it a hemorrhaging stroke. The surgery alleviated the pressure and resumed blood flow but some brain tissue had already died. Those dead tissues would be irrevocably dead. Whatever motor skills, feelings, nerve endings those tissues were attached to would not come back to Amra.
So we are waiting again. To see what comes back on her left side. She is walking now. (Yea!) And also to see what the doctors can do to make sure this doesn’t happen again. They are blaming it on her birth control medicine and dehydration. That makes all us women sit up and pay attention, doesn’t it? Remember all of those little fine print side effects that nobody pays attention to?
During the “oh-she-has-a-mass” diagnosis period of the weekend, I thought I was going to spend this week fighting with my primary care physician to get MRIs for all my children. Now I am just making sure that all my children drink 8 glasses of water each day and getting rid of all medications in our house. We will be using herbs and nature derived potions from now on.