Kayla Quote: Kayla loves animals, so this is appropriate for today.
Jessica commented on Thoughts For Kayla Trolle's Wall post on Facebook -
"The fox "Foxy Lady" as I call her, is alive and well. Paw looks better and the two kits "Jimmy" and "Hendrick" are also alive and well. Momma brought them a mouse or other small creature the other nite, and they were playing with it. I think she was teaching them to hunt. When she gets them back in the den (under shed) she heads out back, or towards Winnie's field, and starts to hunt again." From Alice email perhaps, Jessica is next door neighbor Alice's daughter.
Short Synopsis: Kayla has got to be one of the strongest people I have ever met. I don't know how she does it. She must have a great desire to continue to live and Columbia has the best heart medicine in the world. We are blessed that she is there.
There is continuous bleeding at the site where the canulars go into her body. The bandages get soaked and sometimes the blood oozes out a bit. Her hermatocrit is 22 which is still fine. Below 20 and they consider giving her a unit of blood.
There is a continuous plan to lower her narcotics as she has a little less pain. The presedex (dexmedetomadine) sedative is off. This has been a God send since the arrest on April 1. Her heart rate is up higher now at 132, but that is to be expected for the moment. The methadone is at 10 mg 2x a day intravenously. This will help with withdrawal from narcotics and is still a very low dose.
The great news is that she was on her trach collar for 6 total hours. This is the little collar they put around her neck with a bit of oxygen being pumped in but she is breathing on her own. It is very tiring but necessary to move forward.
According to the Russian respiratory therapist, Tatyana, "You doing veddy goot job today. You stay on trach collar since 9 this morning. Today is a goot day!"
They raised the heparin (which thins the blood) from 1200 to 1300 units. When the INR gets up to 2, they will stop the heparin. The coumadin is therapeutic with the INR in the range of 2-3.
Kayla also spent two hours in the chair sitting up. What people don't understand is that she is as weak as a kitten after the cardiac arrest a month ago. She cannot stand up right now so they either call physical therapy or two nurses get on each side of her to help her get up to transfer her over to a chair for "sitting." This is a very painful and difficult process and Kayla dreads it. The stomach pain is overwhelming but today she did it! Two full hours!
Slowly and surely, Kayla is moving in the right direction.
Long Story: Mordechai's mother is one of the most treasured human beings in his life. Mothers do that when they are good ones. It is nature's way. He continues to teach everyone in our corner and in the waiting room that, according to his religion and way of life, you continue treatment until God decides it is time to go. It is God's decision, not ours, to end a life...to be called back.
"That's my mother. I cannot take it away," he laments. She is on life support - the respirator, the line for dialysis, medicines - although there are fewer medicines she requires now. She had an absyss on her heart which may have resolved itself somehow, not sure here.
Mordechai goes into the unit to see his mother and he tells us that he talks to her in all kinds of ways and he is funny and silly too....and she responds! It seems like a cause and effect thing but the doctors cannot entirely say how much she is there. There is a little hope and she is strong and according to Mordechai, his mother does not want to go, until she decides to go. When I saw her that one time I was impressed immediately by her strength. I expected a frail woman and this was not what she was. Her physical body was clearly strong and the aura in the room was charged.
The CT-CCU unit is quite empty for a brief time. All the beds are crispy made up, white is everywhere. They are fresh and clean and beckoning to save. The waiting area is empty also. Just our little gang in the corner.
This doesn't last long....11 new emergent cases have come in. The place is humming again. The nurses are rushing around. We welcome three new members to our group - Steve, his sister Beth and her boyfriend, Bob. Mom is in the unit struggling for her life. I try to be helpful and listen and they are full of hugs. Beth says I have the best "Mommy hugs." This is radically different from the Cohen family, but I like Mordechai's no touch policy too. It's a good one! Both families are Jewish, different and the same....and I fit right in...or at least I think I do. Their strengths and teachings reach right to my suffering soul...I am very often angry at my God. Honestly, we all have the same God.
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Mordechai is doing his butterfly thing, floating around and touching lives. Everyone here loves him. He is giving and people wait their turn to have a visit with him. A gal, Lydia, whose husband is upstairs in rehab, is grateful for small bits of Mordechai's philosophies. She has brought gifts to him - some cans of sardines and kipper snacks - fillets of herring.
It is time for him to get back home to Atlanta. He spent Passover week watching over his mother. His turn is over and he has gotten extra points for staying here during this religious week. His wife, Naomi and their five children have gone to Los Angeles for the week of Passover. They even go to an amusement park and send him a slide show of pictures via the internet. They are "sleep guests" in a relative's home.
I offered to give him a ride to JFK airport. It is only a half hour drive and my car is parked in a spot where I am not sure it is legal. It's at the edge of an entrance gate where cars come out. The gate is in a permanent half closed position yet there is still room for cars to come out. People park all the time in this spot. You just wonder if the law will come along and give you a ticket.
With a shortage of parking spots, everyone finds possibilities, any funky spot that might pass. I often bump the bumper to squeeze into these narrow spots. In New York it is what you do to fit into a free parking spot. People have rubber or leather bumper guards strapped to their cars to protect their bumpers against all the squeezing.
Mordechai says he plans to take several trains and such - 1.5 hours worth of riding to get to the airport. He will have to drag a bulky suitcase along with other assorted possessions. I ask if he is allowed to accept a ride from me. I tell him I would be happy to help him and that I love to drive.
In the morning, he accepts my ride and says he has to leave at noon. He then went around to touch final base with all who were in his special new circle of friends,
"I had to say my good byes to Kayla, hug Arnold, of course my mom, Lydia and her husband, Sternbergs and who knows who else."
We are out the door and he refuses any help with his bulky luggage. It is awkward for him to drag all this stuff along. We walk one block over and half way down the street and he spots my car.
"How did you know it was mine?"
"The Connecticut license plate," plus it's in that strange parking place.
We have no idea where we are going except the internet says we have to go across 155th Street or something like that, south and away from the river. Something to do with the Degan Expressway. I cannot get to the internet. The guest network does not work outside the hospital. Between the two of us, we are able to figure it out, plus he grew up in Brooklyn. I fill him in with the bleak picture of how hard it is to find a heart for my daughter. Hearts are incredibly hard to get and they are like precious gold to those who are lucky enough to receive one.
"It's a crap shoot. You have to be sick enough to be at the top of the list. All your other organs have to be good and a heart has to come down the pike. If you are lucky and the timing is right, you get one."
When she was a teenager, she was at the top of the list as teenagers went to the top because of a new ruling made in January, 1999. They offered teen hearts to other teens first, then the adult pool because the teenagers were dying waiting for hearts. Sixty adults were competing for hearts back then. Kayla was #3 on the pediatric list, then went quickly to #1, then got a heart in 40 days. Now she is competing with the adult pool and there are 207 waiting at this hospital and 322 waiting in the region. She no longer has special privileges like she did nearly 12 years ago.
Mordechai is silent and has no response.
When we get to the terminal where he has to go in, I jump out to help him with his luggage. He wants no help. I stand there and he says,
"I cannot hug you." He sends a bunch of hugs through the air, he says.
I understand completely. He has already taught me this. I stand back and raise both my arms in a outward gesture of exclamation,
"Good luck to you!" Enjoy being with your family again.....
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Last night I slept in Ridgefield...and the Mooms woke me up at 5:30 a.m.! She gets antsy and does all these annoying things around the room to bother me. Her favorite antic is scratching the blind, which I keep up most of the time, to get it out of her reach....but last night I forgot.... it was the first thing she did to annoy me awake. I was too tired to spritzer her with the water bottle. I sometimes get up and toss her outside....to hell if it's dusk and the coyotes are lurking...but alas....I am too tired to wage any defense at all.
Instead I get up and start my day, knowing that later on at some point, I can always catch a "cat nap." I get by on 5 hours of sleep lately but then will have a crash and get 8 hours at some point. Moomey is playing with something like crazy on the wood floor, batting it all around, zig-zagging.....it's a pink paper clip!
What a wonderful thing that Alice (and/or Jessica?) has named the mother red fox and her two kits. If you name a wild creature, it becomes a member of your pet family....how sweet is that? And Alice is our eyes for continued reporting on how they are doing. Everytime I drive into my driveway at night and shine my car lights in that direction, I catch nothing! Even my husband hasn't seen a thing.
What I find amazing is how the mama fox knows exactly how to survive. She clearly has located herself near human populations and inbetween coyote groupings. The coyotes like the woods. The foxes prefer fields next to the woods. The coyotes are fearful of humans so they stay out of sight. You can just hear them barking at night and now I hear the pups from the Spring birthings. They sound just like dogs only there are the entire packs barking at the same time, even the puppies! That's how you know it is not the neighborhood dogs, which are one or two to a family. At least 6-7-8 animals are barking at the same time, like at a meeting with everyone speaking up together. What a party they are having!
Our little red mama fox is clearly in a great location away from the coyotes!
And what about Violet and Bobby, the red-tails up on the 12th floor ledge at New York University? It's quite boring - no eggs have hatched that I can see. Violet is still sitting quietly but all the prediction times have passed. First it was April 22, then it was adjusted to 3-4 days later and ummm.....still no baby action. Are the eggs duds? I hope not. Viewers have jumped from 800 to over 2,000.
We continue to hope for some action....
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