My Side of Things
Hi everyone! I hope you are all well and had a great past two weeks. I am so sorry I did not get to post last weekend, life has been extremely crazy and I needed a weekend to just step back and not really do anything. These past 3 and a half weeks have been pretty draining and crazy, and lets just say I need a vacation after this.
An update on Cate: it is one step forward and two steps backward. She makes some small improvements, but then something else happens that puts her two steps backward. There is still no found cause of this incident, and because there is no found cause, things get scarier and scarier. She was moved out of the ICU last week to the Neurology floor, and we are now looking at what do we do next? Where will she go after the hospital? She can not be their forever, so what do we do next? The future is unknown.
My life obviously has been completely and utterly flipped upside down. Covid-19 had already done that, but this incident really threw the last punch that forced me to hang by my feet. Everything about my family life is different. There is only one of my parents home at a time, no medical issues, and no loud Cate. The sound of the house has to be one of the biggest adjustments. It is so quiet with only two of us in the house at a time, I cannot remember a time where it was this quiet.
My parents have been trying to come home at night since Cate is in such great care. The three of us get to see each other maybe for around 2 hours a day, but it is better than nothing. So much has happened with our family, it is weird, but I have found it to be hard to make conversation with my parents at times. My mind is so full of thoughts and questions, it feels like my mind is racing a million miles a minute that I just do not know what to say. I am a huge talker and extrovert, but for one of the first times I am speechless. There are a lot of unanswered questions with Cate, and that is extremely frustrating to me. I want to go into the medical field to answer those questions, but being on the other side of things is very hard. In an attempt to comfort myself, I try to say to myself that understanding the frustration from the parent and family side of medicine will make me a better medical professional.
Another hard part about this time for me is where will Cate go next. It seems now that Cate will need 24/7 medical care from a team of nurses, and selfishly I do not want Cate home because of that. I am not sure if I had mentioned this in past posts, but before this incident with Cate, there was a gradual increase in the medical care she needed. Cate being home during this time because very stressful to me to the point where I was never settled at home and I was always stressed out. Of course I wish Cate was home happy and healthy, but it is the first time I have felted completely relaxed at home. Cate coming home with a literal team of medical people would turn my home into a hospital, and I do not think mentally I would be able to handle this. If this happened, I would not be home really at all and I would never have friends over. I have voiced this to my parents and we have been able to have some really good conversations about what is next. They have been really great about listening to my side of things, and we are working towards making a decision that is best for my entire family.
Overall, I am doing okay. This is certainly a crazy time, but I think I am handling it better than I thought I could have. I am very lucky to have an amazing support system through my friends and family. My friends have been amazing through this, and I am extremely lucky to have them. I have never felt as supported and loved as I have these past 3 weeks. I and we will get through this.
I am sorry this entry was a bit of a brain dump, but as I said, my mind is so full right now. Thank you for reading and I hope you have a great week ahead.
-Alex