Heard from my mother today.

[SeaCat]

Well I heard from my mother today. After she gave me all the latest on the rest of the family she finally got around to what I was wondering about.

My mother has been dealing with some medical problems. She has been dealing with abdominal pain as well as leg pain. These have truly been limiting her quality of life for the past several months. She had talked with me about this a couple of months ago and admitted to having had a Colonoscopy in New England. During that Colonoscopy they had found a Polyp and removed it. She felt better for a short while after this but her abdominal pain had returned.

On my advice she had gone in for another C-Scope down here. They found three more Polyps, the largest of which was over 3cm. They removed these and her abdominal pain once again went away. (Yes they did check the Polyps and they are not cancerous.) So she's starting to feel better but she still has a hard time walking.

This is a woman who used to walk several miles a day and now has a hard time walking to the mailbox and back without crippling pain. I had her send me a list of the medications she is on and almost fell over when I looked it over.

Okay I'm not an M.D. In fact I'm merely a lowly C.N.A. Even so I looked over the list and started shaking my head. Her Doctor's have her on a total of five Statins. (Drugs for High Cholesterol.) She is on a total of over 15 medications counting the Statins. Some of these are for her Cholesterol, some are for her High Blood Pressure, and three are to stop her from having another Heart Attack. (Oh and a couple of them are Steroids.) To my mind she is over medicated. Severely overmedicated. (And yes I have talked with a Doctor I work with. I won't try to repeat what he said, but then again I don't speak Afrikaans.)

So now next week she is going in to talk with a doctor down here. She has a list of questions as well as her list of medications. She also has her medical records.

It should be interesting to see what the doctor down here says.

Cat

 

[only_more_so]

That sounds like what happened to my grandmother years ago. She lived in Appalachia and her doctor didn't do her any favors. He had her on a bunch of different medicines, more than half of which were to treat side effects of the other medicines she was taking.

She eventually came to live with us, and my family's doctor looked at her and took her off everything. Then after a week he was able to diagnose what she might actually need.

 

[oggbashan]

My father was admitted to a local residential home for the elderly because his short term memory had gone.

He was taking 25 tablets a day. The doctor who treated the home's residents monitored my father for a week and gradually reduced the medication to nil. All my father eventually needed was a slightly modified diet because of his Type II diabetes.

My father survived 6 years in that residential home in good physical health, well-cared for and loved. His short term memory was so bad that he couldn't remember whether he had eaten breakfast or not, half an hour after he had.

He knew that the staff would tell him whether he had or had not eaten breakfast and he trusted them. If he was really convinced that he hadn't eaten they would give him another breakfast because he was walking 10 to 15 miles a day, every day, whatever the weather. The extra calories wouldn't matter.

Until the last six weeks of his life the only medication he had needed was a single course of antibiotics for a persistent urinary infection.

The removal of the medication and the careful diet extended his active life.

I consider that the residential home went well beyond their required duties to make sure that my father was as comfortable as he could be.

I wish that all residential care was as good.

Og

 

[Guest]

i am convinced that a medication error caused the death of my mother. on her death certificate, it says pancytopenia. thats like...no blood..no red, no white...essentially zip.

what caused this pancytopenia? the hematologist and i talked about this...it was the mixture of two medications that, in people who are immunocompromised, causes the death of blood cells. see, mom had breast cancer and the radiation from the treatment caused her to develop palendromal(sp) rheumatoid arthritis which was treated with... you got it...cancer drugs. god it was awful. i fought so hard to get her removed from several drugs. i hated injecting her. but its difficult when the doctor doesnt want to hear whats going on because...how dare you take more than 15 min in an appointment...

the best thing i ever did was pretend i didnt know she was on vioxx and i "forgot" to put it in her pill regimine. that, atleast bought us some time.