A Rescue in the Family

My mom, at the age of 79, is a twenty-two year survivor of what was defined at the time as "terminal lung cancer", but her health has never been the same and she struggles now with both congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). On Friday, September 26th, she couldn't breathe, even with oxygen, and reluctantly called 911. She also called and left a message for me. She was taken to the ER and eventually admitted into St. Rose Dominican Hospital. I arrived (traveling from SF to LV) the next day.They removed fluid from her right lung and treated her with anti-biotics and she responded well and was discharged that Sunday night.

The following Wednesday, while riding in the car with me on the way home from a follow-up appointment with her cardiologist, she had, out of a clear blue sky, a seizure. After about 20 seconds of full-body shaking and semi-consciousness, she came out of it, lucid and OK, which made it seem a lot less scary than it could have been. We were less than a mile from her home with no good place to pull over and so I just headed on. Before we got there she had another. Once we made it into the house, she had another one. That's when I decided we needed to go back to the ER (which I knew was the last place she wanted to go). We got there (couple more on the way) and I screeched the car up to the ER doors and ran in to get help. They got her into the ER and mercifully let her bypass the intake process because one of the nurses recognized her from a couple days back and she was already in the system. They had a hard time getting blood pressure and pulse info on her and when they did, her heart rate was 200 bpm and then even the cool, calm ER types got a little excited.

It turns out that she had been on a dose of beta blocker that was too high and was depressing her blood pressure but, when told to hold off taking it completely when her blood pressure was too low, set her up for this really bad arrythmia. The seizures were our friend. They were what told us that something was really wrong and if it hadn't been for them and the care that they resulted in, she likely would have died. Once again, she responded very well to treatment and was discharged on Saturday. On Monday, she came home with me to SF to recuperate. She's doing well and is working REALLY hard to take it easy, something that does not come naturally to her. This post is in her honor and this story is told as I remember it.

When I was little, we lived in an apartment at 5300 Tropicana Avenue in Las Vegas. The apartment complex was shaped like a long rectangle with apartments on the long sides and utility rooms on the short sides and a shared pool and green space in the center.

One day, my mom was doing laundry and had stuff drying on a clothesline when it got really windy which, in Las Vegas means flying dirt, sand and dust.

She went out to get the clothes before they were ruined and was hurrying through the flying dirt with them on her way back to the apartment when she saw my plastic pail floating in the vacant pool. Being as she is, she told me, she didn't like that and wanted to get the pail out of the pool. But she wanted to get the clean clothes into the house and out of the dirt more so she resisted the impulse. But, as she was passing it by, something told her, "Get the pail!" and thinking, "Oh Goddammit", she set down the laundry and went to the pool's edge to get it.

When she got there, she saw her neighbor's five year old son, Chris, laying at the bottom of it. She jumped in, grabbed him up, hurled him out of the pool and on to the decking and then jumped on him and started pounding on his chest. His mother saw this last bit out her window and came flying out of her apartment ready to kill my mother and demanding to know what in the hell she was doing which, my mother says, she didn't even bother to respond to. Somewhere along the way, Chris came to and vomited a bunch of pool water and his mother Mitzi realized that he had been in the pool and my mother dismounted and Mitzi reclaimed her half-drowned son.


Mitzi was hard of hearing and appearantly Chris had woken up from his nap and quietly gone, without her knowing, outdoors to play soldier wearing my pail as his hat. It had fallen down over his eyes and, unable to see, he had stepped off the edge of pool and fallen in.



But my mom saved him- a rescue in the family.