Monday evening report (9:30pm)

Dr. Kubac's assistant (Glenda) called mom this afternoon to follow up on her Coumadin level. Apparently they adjust the dosage week by week. Mom really likes Glenda and thinks she is very competent, so mom told her about the spells. Glenda said that she had never heard of that before, but that she would discuss it with Dr. Kubac (the cardiologist).

A while later, Glenda called back and said that Dr. Kubac wants mom to "wear the harness" for 24 hours before her next appointment. The harness is some kind of portable heart monitor, and Kubac is hoping that mom will have some spells during that period and that the harness thing will capture the data. If it does, that will be a pretty conclusive test to prove that low heart rate (i.e., not enough blood to the brain) is causing the spells. So now in addition to an appointment in Medford with Dr. Kim on Wednesday, we go into KF on Thursday to get mom hooked up to the harness, and then we go back into KF on Friday to see Dr. Kubac. We could potentially learn a lot this week.

At dinner, mom and I discussed the whole idea of slow heart rate causing these spells, and we also discussed the fact that if that is the cause, there really isn't anything that can be done about it. When mom was in the hospital in April, Bill had an opportunity to take Dr. Kubac aside and talk to him about a pacemaker, but Kubac said it really isn't an option because pacemakers are for the situation where the heart is racing, and it won't do anything for an excessively slow heart rate. I didn't know that when mom and I were talking, so I mentioned the idea of a pacemaker, and mom said that she wouldn't want one anyway. She also told me that she has noticed that it disrupts her train of thought, and if she is talking, she can't continue because she "loses her thought."

Bill made a kind of interesting observation this evening, about how her spells seem to be on a 2-day cycle. She had a lot of them on Friday, then very few on Saturday, then more on Sunday, then few today. I guess if she has a lot of them tomorrow, that will continue the cycle.

I saw one of them this evening after dinner. I was in the kitchen cleaning up and mom had been sitting in her recliner. I looked out into the living room just in time to see her standing beside the arm of the recliner and then taking a half-turn and sitting/falling down into the recliner. She said that she had gotten up to go to the sliding glass door when she had one. Luckily she had been able to turn enough to get back into the chair. Kind of scary to think what might have happened if she had been a few feet farther away from the chair and closer to the wood stove (which, as usual, was cranked up to warp speed).

She gets irritated if I try to get her to carry the cane, and she gets irritated if I try to stay nearby when she is on the move. It is impossible to watch her every second, so it's really just luck that determines where she will land. She has no warning that one is coming.