E-mail from my sister Betty, about our Mom – 01/20/2008

Betty goes to visit Mom just about every day. It’s about a 50-mile round trip, so it’s no small thing. Betty has given me permission to post her update messages for all to read.

Hi – Just a quick note to let you all know how Mom is doing. For about the past month she has been experiencing more pain – what seems to be in her back. I’ve been in touch with the nurses about it and they’ve done several 24 hour pain assessments. Finally, this past week the pain had gotten to the place that she was grimacing and then on Thursday she was actually crying out in pain with tears running down her cheeks. At that point, the over-cautious RN’s finally took action. The long story short is that today Mom started on a stronger pain medication. I was a little worried that we might come and find her too sleepy to know that we were there. But, on the contrary, she was better than we’ve seen here since that bout of pneumonia the end of November – beginning of December. We still have to figure out how often she’ll need it to keep her comfortable – right now she gets it with breakfast and it really helped to relax her for her morning cares. She can have it up to 3 times daily, we’re starting with once a day.

So the happy ending is: the Energizer Bunny is still marching to the beat of her own drum.

Betty