Please keep Keith and his family in your prayers and your hearts. They have suffered the loss of their mother in a tragedy of events that every person fears when someone they love has a health event and then they start to recover and then they find complications and then they have more complications and soon they no longer are with us. It is a horrific way to watch someone pass as well as a horrific experience personally to have to go thru. Your hopes are up and then dashed and then up and then dashed and it is so hard on anyone to have to experience this.
Keith my heart goes out to you and your family. I pray you find the strength you need to do the things you need to do and the peace you need to move forward. You were a GREAT son and your mom was proud of you...I know she was. She and your father did great raising you and they leave a great legacy to this world through you. Lots of Hugs...Kamala
Printed with permission from an email Keith sent me...
I know we talked about our mothers on the trip, so I will fill you in on my last couple weeks. On December 26th my mother had a stroke. She survived the stroke and began to make a recovery, moved to a rehab center on December 31st. She was doing well, her short term memory was not so good, and I know she had to get enough back to remember to take, or if she had taken her meds. Her long term memory was rock solid. On Jan 7th, she began to complain of a pain in her right leg and was a little lethargic and didn't want to do her rehab exercises. On Jan 8th, she was still complaining of the leg pain, and still didn't have the drive to do her rehab exercises. I got a call at work at 11:00 am that day, the rehab center was sending her to the Emergency Room so they could check her out. A CT scan was done, it showed the stroke damaged area of the brain and it was bleeding slightly. The told me that was not that out of the ordinary for this to occur and it explained why she was lethargic. They also discovered a bladder infection and pneumonia. They went to treat her infection and pneumonia with IV antibiotics, then have her under observation for a few days before they would send her back to rehab. Within seconds of the IV being hooked up, my mom sat up and asked "Why am I itching? Why am I itching? Her eyes rolled back in her head, her blood pressure dropped and she went unconscious. They put her into an induced coma, put in breathing tube, got her back and stabilized her enough to get her another CT Scan to see if the stroke area had acted up again. My sisters arrived about this time. They took her from Acute Observation Area to Neuro area, but she coded on the way, and by the time we got to her new room they had a large crew doing rotations with chest compressions, after 12 minutes, we told them to stop. Real CPR is pretty brutal and at that point we felt if she did come back, it would not have been a full recovery and would just leave her in a terrible state. That was the end. She had no history of any allergies to any medications. We had a memorial/visitation for her last night. She was cremated so we can hold off the actual burial. We will bury her next to my dad at Fort Snelling when the weather gets warmer.
