Connie foot update

As my faithful, kind, followers have seen, I have not been blogging like I should.  Those that follow me on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter know that I have been busy.  Those that have had no idea have been nice to call to ask the reason.  Since the first of the year my mother has been in and out of the hospital three times, her latest this past week.  The first visit was due to a change in medication which resulted in a five day observation stay, plus a week in a crappy skilled nursing/rehab facility.  The second visit was due to an infection in the foot wound that required surgery, a longer hospital stay in the critical care unit, and a three week stay at a great skilled nursing/rehab facility where she was given medication through a PICC line.  She went home on a Wednesday and was back in the hospital on Friday where she is residing still.

In the past, since the beginning of this foot saga, she has claimed that she had osteomyelitis (OM).  The infectious disease doctors, and various others, have all sort of shrugged because the MRIs that she had done didn't definitively show that to be the case. Apparently, now they have changed their minds.  This group of hospitalists said that the prior MRIs were poor due to movement and ordered a new one.  This time her foot was packed so that she couldn't move it and the results showed OM in the bone that is the cause of her foot wound.  The treatments for that are the PICC line medication or amputation.  Connie chose the first one.

She is on vancomycin through the PICC line for approximately four to six weeks.  She is also taking two oral antibiotics to go along with the vancomycin.  She will head back to the same skilled nursing/rehab facility that she stayed in recently.  It is connected with the hospital, and her hospitalist physician that has worked with her at various times through this almost four year saga will be her doctor there.  She was informed that she would be back in her same room with the same roommate that she had just received a couple of days before she checked out.

The prognosis on this infection is that it will come and go and that they will continue to treat her with the medication as amputation would just cause more problems.  The infection can spread.  Eventually the treatments may become too much and Connie can opt out of them.  At that point the hospital will keep her comfortable.  For now she goes along with the treatment.  It isn't the first time she has done this same treatment.  She did this twice before when the foot wound first happened and she has done it in fewer weeks since that time.  Each treatment has bought her more time so she is hopeful that this one will too.

I shall try not to feel like I must go visit her every day.  She is thirty minutes from me and visiting cuts into my day.  We both agree that we have to be more reasonable when it comes to this.  I have to continue on with my life and she has to work on getting healthy. Which means more blogging and more foot photos to come! Thanks for your loyalty, dear readers.