Where we are and how we got here

plural occiputs or oc·cip·i·ta \äk-ˈsip-ət-ə\. Definition of OCCIPUT. : the back part of the head or skull.

I'm calling the blog The Occiput of Sue since that's where the bleeding was.  Following is the email that went out to several different groups on Tuesday (6/19) night or early Wednesday (6/20) morning.  This starts from the beginning and gets us to Wednesday's post, which I'll make sometime later this evening.
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I’m dashing a quick note off before we go up there this morning, but I had to take Sue to the ER yesterday (Sunday) with the “worst headache she ever had”, which had come on suddenly as she was driving home from church.  Many of you know that Sue has struggled with headaches for years, so for this to be the worst one is really saying something.

When I wrote you Monday morning, about all I knew was that Sue had had 2 CT scans while we were in the ER, the second being a dye study of her brain to check for aneurism, which they didn’t find, and she was resting fairly comfortably when I left the hospital around midnight. 

Moday morning they did another CT scan (no dye this time) which showed the area of bleeding (which they are calling a sub-arachnoid hemorrhage) had grown smaller overnight.  They scheduled an MRI then as well, or at least put Sue on the waiting list.  When I left the hospital at around 9:00 they still hadn’t got her in for the MRI.  She had a stream of visitors throughout the day, and the kids got a chance to spend some time with mom and assure themselves that she was OK.  Her pain levels went up and down all day, and she was given Vicodin to get her through the worst of those.  She said it never got above a 6 on their pain scale, which would probably put me under the table, but which she seemed to take in stride.  She finally got the MRI done at 1:00 am Tuesday.  I took the kids to my brother’s house Monday night, and got home about 2:30 am Tuesday.

I called Sue about 8:00 Tuesday morning to find out if she had the MRI, and she said the nurses told her the doctor would be visiting her soon so I rushed over to the hospital to find that a resident had already been there, but hadn’t added much to our understanding of what had happened or what they were going to do next.  Up to this point we had not seen a full-fledged doctor since a 5-minute visit from the presiding ER doc within an hour or so of our arrival Sunday afternoon.  We were quite anxious to find out what all the tests were telling us and what would happen next.  Well, we waited all day for the Neurosurgeon to show up, which he finally did about 4:00 Tuesday afternoon.

Sue had a pretty rough Tuesday.  She had a non-migrane headache pretty much all day, and needed one of the Vicodin about every two hours.  This is a version of Vicodin which doesn’t have as much Tylenol in it, so your liver doesn’t explode when you really need the pain meds.  That med also upset her stomach, so in went the anti-nausea meds as well.  I stopped answering phones so that the chatter wouldn’t disturb whatever rest she was getting, which was about one hour of sleep in every two, when the Vicodin kicked in.  Around 3pm she started feeling better – the headache being a 1 or a 0 at that point, with no nausea, and she was able to eat some fruit and some jello.

The Neurosurgeon (Dr. Abood – who has done 5 different back surgeries for members of my family, including me) was able to clarify a lot for us.  All day Tuesday Sue was complaining of lower back pain which I just attributed to being flat on her back since Sunday afternoon.  Turns out, the blood from her brain is draining into the spinal fluid and then settling in her low back.  Blood is apparently an irritant for nerves, which that area is full of, and that blood is what is causing her back pain.  He told her to get up and move around as much as she felt comfortable with to get that blood worked out of there.

He also suspects that some “spontaneous bruising” she has been having in different spots over the last couple of weeks may be related to this bleed in her brain, so next up is some work by the hematologists, starting with some blood draws tomorrow.

So that is the story for the Monday and Tuesday episodes of this saga.  I would rather neither of us would have gotten a part in this play, but such is the providence of God.

Prayer requests are all the standard ones as far as healing Sue, and guiding medical folks and the two of us in the decisions we have yet to make.  Pray also for our girls, who kinda freaked out watching mom get hauled away like that.  The visit with her on Monday helped them, but Lauren especially has a hard time with fears and traumatic experiences, and I’m concerned what will happen in her little head this week.  They’ll both be back Wednesday night so they can go to music lessons on Thursday and Friday.  (Marilyn, for obvious reasons Lauren hasn’t had much time to practice this week, but she will have a little on Thursday so you should be OK on Friday!)

Finally, thank you to all who have prayed for us.  I have noticed the effect of them particularly in that I am not anxious at all about what is going on.  I believe God is sustaining all four of us, and his will is being accomplished in Sue’s illness and our walking through it.  The walking is no work of mine, I can tell you!  There is a definite sense of God holding and sustaining Sue through all her pain.