Nancy Foster Nancy A Foster

Welcome to Nancy's  CaringBridge website. We are using it to keep  friends updated in one place. There are too many people who are concerned and care to know how Nancy is to keep up via email and phone. 


We should begin by telling the story of what has happened this summer with Nancy. 


She was feeling ill for some time, and finally she went to the emergency room at NY Medical on July 25th. They found she had congestive heart failure and admitted her, putting her in Cardiac ICU. After she was stabilized, she was moved to the Cardiac Unit. (There were some ups and downs during that time, but this is the shortened version.) By August 8th they felt she was stabilized enough to be discharged to rehab.


 Since there were no available good openings in Manhattan, she was sent to a good rehab center in Valhalla (The Grove.) Unfortunately, after one day there when she had PT, went into the garden, and played cards with Mary Maciejewski, she had a stroke in the night or very early morning (when they found her in the morning it was not clear what time the stroke had occurred.)  She was transferred to the ER at Westchester Medical Center, where she has been in the neurological unit. First she was in Neuro ICU, and has been since moved to a regular room. She has made some improvement, but overall her heart is extremely weak and her stroke very severe. She is able to talk a little, and has enjoyed visitors. However, her medication has been increased to enable her to sleep (she could not sleep at night before.) She is only able to eat very little, and has no appetite. So her condition is very fragile, and her heart is only able to work at about 20 %.



She has been approved to be admitted to Calvary Hospital in the Bronx, and will be moved there this week as soon as a bed is available. The hospital is designed for palliative care. If her condition changes for the better, she may be moved again into rehab. But at this point, this is the appropriate care for her condition. By the way, both David MacKinnon and Sheldon Brown have been able to consult with the doctors both at NY Medical and Westchester, and both feel this is the appropriate help for her at this point.


I realize that Calvary is going to be more difficult to visit than where Nancy is now, so we hope to create a rotation of visitors so that she will have a visitor several days a week, and not have a lot of people at once. We will work on organizing that. But first we need to open this site to all of you in order to keep everyone up to date and informed. 


At the present time, the best thing is to check with Westchester Medical Center before visiting Nancy to see if she is still there.


So, until the next post. There will be a section for you to make comments as you wish.


Becky