As many of you may know, Mom is in the ICU at Touro Hospital. On Thursday, April 22nd, she had called her doctor feeling unwell. She had not been herself-depressed, nauseous, chills. Jean-Paul and I even thought she might have had covid again. The next day, on Friday, April 23rd, Dr. Wise's office called me in the afternoon that Mom wasn't answering the phone and they were just checking up. I thought that was nothing unusual as she often has the phone off the hook, or perhaps had gone out with friends. I tried her lines, no answer. I thought I'd just swing by anyway on the way to the grocery. When I drove up, around 3:00 p.m., I knew something was wrong as the newspaper was still out and the front lights were on. As I opened the door, the alarm went off, which is also unusual, and her bed was unmade with the curtains closed.I found Mom cold and incoherent on the floor in the bathroom, and the paramedics brought her to the hospital. Initially, she was diagnosed with a shattered hip, but things deteriorated from there. She had apparently been lying injured on the floor for approximately 14 hours. She must have had an infection before the accident, and she now is in septic shock. Her kidneys were damaged and are struggling, so she has been put on dialysis. A big challenge is her dramatically low blood pressure. What seemed at first to be the crucial next step, the operation to repair the hip, has been put on the back-burner until these life-threatening conditions are no longer looming. Touro's staff has been wonderful, and she is receiving great care.
Forgive me if I cannot answer texts and phone calls so easily, but we will do our best to update this site. We are truly grateful for your love and concern, but please do not show up at the ICU. I will definitely send her your love when she has moments of lucidity.
Although dated, and a little silly, Black Velvet Band was her favorite Irish song--it captures the spirit of the romance when we first started living in Ireland in 1973. We four lived on a cliff above the Atlantic on Ballinskelligs Bay, in County Kerry. We lived with the fishermen and farmers and our house was powered by turf. My father was writing his first book, and they were able to escape the materialistic burdens of the world at the right time, and in the right way.
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