Hospital visits

I've spent the past 2 days going back and forth between home and the hospital. My grandma took a fall early yesterday morning. She lives in a home (that is in the process of getting licensed, so her caregiver can have more than one person to care for) where a lady takes care of her. My mom has been concerned lately that my grandma should not be getting herself out of bed in the middle of the night to use the little "commode" that is kept in her room for night time use. My grandma keeps insisting (well, of course she would!) she's ok to use it - she doesn't want to use depends at night and she doesn't want to wake her caregiver up every night. My mom has suggested a couple of times to both my grandma and her caregiver to not use this anymore as she is afraid she will fall and hurt herself.  And so she did.  She apparently hit her face on her walker and got a few cuts.

I'm a little frustrated with her caregiver. I would think that anytime someone, who will be 95 years old in 3 weeks, falls she should be checked out by a doctor! She put some ointment on her cuts, put her back to bed and called my mom first thing in the morning to tell her about the fall, but that she seemed ok and was eating breakfast good. By early afternoon she was not doing well at all and my mom took her to ER. Her face had bruised more by then and looked terrible and she was basically not alert or coherent at all by then. They did a catscan and blood work and while waiting for all that (a couple of hours, of course) they had her neck in a brace. She barely woke up the whole first 2 hours I was there and when she did she was pretty out of it and just wasn't comfortable at all. Finally the doc came back in and said her catscan was ok and took the neck brace off. As soon as that came of she was so much more comfortable and perked up quite a bit, so we all breathed a little easier. But, that whole time she had been coughing and lots of mucous in her throat. They decided to do a chest x-ray and that showed the start of pneumonia and the blood work showed her heart enzymes were a little elevated (which could be just from her age, the nurse told me) so they decided to admit her for at least a day or two to keep an eye on her and see what is going on.

Today, not much change at all, really, and they decided to do an x-ray of her stomach area just as I was leaving.  She is more alert than she was the first few hours at ER, so that is good.  She is such a tough little bird!