My husband had a stroke in 1993, & with some peripheral vision loss, he is fine today. He had a few minor memory issues to begin with but he recovered very well.
I visited her in hospital today. She just sat there, sleeping with rales. She opende her Yes for a fel seconde and soort of looked at me, but I don’t think she recognised me.
Last Friday we visited her in hospital again. The neurologist explained to us that she'd had a stroke in the brain stem. One of the effects-was that she couldn't swallow, so she was being fed through a tube but something went terribly wrong. My great-grandmother had a hiatal hernia, causing gastroesophageal reflux disease. Whatever they pumped into her stomach had come back up into the oesophagus en ended up in one of her lungs. That of course explained why she was having so much trouble breathing, and why she was wearing an oxygen mask. They were considering an intervention to get as much of that stuff out of her lung, but they warned us that they would not be able to get everything out, and the intervention itself was quite risky. So, while they were preparing for that intervention, new information came from the radiologist who had looked at het X-rays in more detail, and they finally decided not to do the intervention. We spent some time with her and I held her hand for a while. At the time we weren't even sure if she knew we were there, but when I let go of her hand, I saw her hand moving around, ads if she was searching for something, so I reached out again and she grabbed my hand. Later we went home while my uncle and aunt stayed with her. We were just back home when my uncle called that her condition was deteriorating fast, so we went back to the hospital, but we were too late. My uncle told us that she suddenly open her eyes, clearly said "I don't want that anymore" and ripped her oxygen mask off. A nurse came rushing in and my great-grandmother said "thirsty". So the nurse tried to give her some fluid and put the mask back, but she kept pushing it away, saying "No! No!" Less then a minute later she was dead. I had never seen a dead person before, so I didn't quite know what to expect. She looked horrible. Her skin was some weird greyish blue, her entire face looked like it was sunken in and, frankly, I hardly recognised her. Yesterday I saw her again at the funeral home. It was surreal. She looked more beautiful than she had looked in years, but... it just wasn't her. I felt like I was looking at a really good wax statue. I'm not going back to the funeral home. This is not how I want to remember her. The cremation is on Thursday, but I don't want to be near her until the coffin is closed.
Yes we were. Sometimes I saw her more as a friend than as my great-grandmother. She could always make me laugh and we used to do wheelchair races in the corridors of the house where she lived, and scare the crap out of people.
