So much has happened in the past week, I thought I'd summarize in a quick post. Lately, perhaps for the last few weeks or month, my mom had had some cognitive issues. There were problems with forgetting birthdays and finding words. Mom's thinking was more tangental and less linear. We were told, and believed that it was "chemo brain." It sounded like the descriptions of chemo brain that we read online, and we had no reason to think otherwise. 

The cognitive problems seemed to get worse, and mom had difficulty dialing a phone. Writing became very difficult. A week ago, mom became very weak and had to be taken to the ER by ambulance. She spent a night in the hospital and felt better the next day, so she was released. I drove up from Chicago to be with her, and on Sunday, we went to a regularly scheduled out-patient appointment. 


At the appointment, we had the incredible good fortune to have Katrina as a care provider. Katrina is a physician's assistant that knew my mom well. They had had many long talks, went out to coffee and spent lots of time together during my mom's first cycle of chemo, but by coincidence, they hadn't seen each other in over a month. 

When Katrina asked my mom to explain her symptoms on Friday, the day that she was weak and had to be hospitalized, my mom's answer and way of speaking caused some alarm, since Katrina saw a change since the last time they had seen each other. On a hunch, Katrina ordered a CT scan, so off we went, one floor down and a five minute walk to the scan. By the time we came back, about ten minutes later, a full trauma team was in place to whisk my mom to the ER. The scan revealed a large subdural hematoma showing both an old and an active bleed on the brain. 

Minutes later, we were at another hospital building in an ER with a neurosurgeon, explaining that mom would need urgent surgery.