Momma Drama (title yanked from my seester)

I'm doing this in bullet form because I'm tired and frustrated and scared.

• June 22, 2009 - My mom had her left knee replaced. This was done a week earlier than originally planned because her surgeon, Dr. M, is going to be out of town the week her surgery was planned for.

Her surgery went well but she really struggled after the surgery. A lot of pain, a lot of nausea, a lot of swear words (from her, not me) that she doesn't remember, a lot of tears from me and a fine dance between nurses to determine was the right amount of pain medications. They finally got it figured out but it was nearly unbearable for me to be there. I actually left early because I simply couldn't stand to be there any more. Dad, Caleb and my younger sister all agreed this was probably better...for her and I.

• Mom came home June 24 in the evening and was in pain, but she DID just have major surgery. Throughout the next week and a half, she has a home health nurse and therapist come to the house.
• She ends up back at the doctor's office on June 30 because of a red area on her shin (something she got with her last knee surgery too) that the home health care nurse was thinking could be infection. The doctor gave her an antibiotic (she wasn't on ANY antibiotic until this point, which still confuses me) to "get the nurses off his back". I wasn't there to hear him say this so I don't know if he was just being funny or what...It did help reduce the redness....the redness is there as a result from realigning her knee.

She also wears compression stockings, which scares me to put on her bad knee because I'm so afraid I'm going to hurt her. They tried to go get a second pair, so that one pair could be in the wash as she wears the other pair but evidently, you have to give up your first, second and third born children in order to get it.

• Last Thursday, July 2, Mom had her staples removed by her surgeon. Her knee, at this point, has no stopped bleeding/draining since her surgery. After the removal of her staples, her knee starts bleeding a lot. By the time she got home around 5, the gauze is completely blood soaked. She changed her bandages and when she checked it again at 6, the bleeding had slowed down. When she was getting ready to go to bed around 10, she went to change her bandage and her incision had split open :( She called the home health nurse, after trying to get ahold of the doctor. The nurse came out immediately, looked at the incision and told mom that she could see a blood clot in her knee. The nurse then tries to get ahold of the doctor,(who is not the surgeon who did her knee replacement but another doctor in the office) who called back around 12...nearly two hours later. He talked to the nurse and told mom to get her butt in the ER.

So, on July 3, Mom was in the ER. They cleaned it out, got the blood clot out ( the doctor told mom that there are good and bad clots. This clot was a good one - trying to stop all of her bleeding.) and used sutures to close it up. The ER doctor told her that it wasn't the staples being taken out - whether she had had them taken out when she did or this week, the incision still would have split open.
Moved forward to yesterday, June 6:

• I went over there to help her throughout the day. She wanted to take a shower, but needs help because she still is so tired and not able to stand up too long by herself. She did very well and stood up for the entire shower - it was a quick one but she did it :) As I was helping her get out of the shower, I realize that her knee is still draining. I think I said something to her and she said that her doctor told her that because she's overweight, she is going to drain more. I helped her bandage her knee back up, got her stockings back on and got her ready for her post-ER check-up.
• Getting her in the car caused tears for both of us, both getting there and back. She just can't move her leg like a normal person, which makes getting in and out of a car extremely difficult.
• We got to the office and she gets to see her surgeon's main nurse - a WONDERFUL woman who cares a lot about the patients and is feisty :) Being that the doctor who saw my mom yesterday was not her "boss"/the surgeon and I think the nurse struggled a bit with dealing with this other doctor.
• The other doctor, Dr. T, came in, asked mom a ton of questions, pushed around on her knee (made her whince and her knee drain a lot), looked at her drainage and told her that if this was his knee and if she was his patient, he would send her to surgery. Because he is the active doctor (her doctor is on vacation until Monday),and she IS technically his patient right now, she's having surgery today.
• The surgery is set for 7:15 pm, and we have to be at the hospital at 5:15pm. They are going to re-open the knee (the sutures from the ER really didn't pull her incision completely closed (which they want it somewhat open so that it can drain....but it is too open), irrigate it out with a "squirt gun" (the doctor's words), culture it and then staple it back shut. She's going to be in the hospital until at least Friday on IV antibiotics.

From the sounds of it, Dr. T believes there is some type of infection going on - which could be causing her nasty drainage, lack of healing and all around problems. This is going to set her back a few weeks but I know that this doctor knows what he's doing and wouldn't be sending her to surgery unless he felt it was necessary.
She will have to have IV antibiotics after she gets home and she will be getting those through the Infectious Disease Specialist - the same one who treated me during my Hepatitis C treatment. I LOVE her, her staff and her partner (I've only worked with him once but he seemed to know what he was doing) and am happy to hear that they will be taking care of her :)

I'm emotionally exhausted and physically just as tired. I'll be taking mom to the hospital because everyone else will still be at work. Dad should get there shortly after we get there.

I want to be strong and need to be strong but I want to just sit and cry.