Ant Attack

    Did I say something in the last blog about Mom being safe?  Hah.

    She came running in the house about 3:15 yelling, “Ants!”  An hour later we were on the way to the emergency room.

    After her dash into the shower, her left ankle was fire engine red and exquisitely painful to the touch.  Her right ankle had a red patch too, as did the back of her right hand. 

    I missed the initial stir she made in the hospital:  upon her insistence, I dropped her at the door and then parked.  In the two minutes it took me to get to the waiting room, she was already in a wheelchair ready to go back to ER.  I guess there is nothing quite like a 96-pound, 83-year-old woman rushing into the hospital in her deerskin slippers and hollering about pain to motivate health care personnel. 

    After the initial attention from nurse and doctor with a healthy dose of  lidocaine ointment, we waited.  Mom’s pain was evident by her exclamations and jerks and twitches. What seemed an eternity later--but which probably was within the half hour-- came the Percocet.  No relief, and I could see swelling start around her ankles.  Then came the handful of pills:  a steroid, Benadryl, and Pepcid.  Another lengthy waiting period followed in which Mom became increasingly agitated and even used that word to describe herself to the doctor, who suggested Atavan (an anti-anxiety medication).  While we were waiting for the Atavan, the pain pill gradually kicked in and Mom became more relaxed.  Then after the Atavan, we waited for her prescriptions and discharge from ER, and I watched her gradually get a little “drunk” from the medications:  relaxed but restless.

    So we are home now, just under four hours after we left.  We have prescriptions to fill tomorrow and a lengthy list of things to watch out for as pertain to allergic reactions.  I took Mom over to John’s to watch a bit of TV, and he will bring her back over in a little while.  Though she is much more comfortable than she was four hours ago, her ankles and hand itch, her skin is tender, and she still gets little jolts of pain.  Plus, she keeps forgetting what happened.

    As a matter of fact, I listened to her memory evolve in the ER.  First, she thought it was nettle, and then I told the health care professionals that she came in the house hollering “Ants!”  (Of course, it could have been ground hornets.)  She started out with not remembering where she was when she got bitten, to saying it was by the road, to explaining it was by the driveway, to telling how she had seen a bunch of ants on the ground and decided to walk through them, to running through a swarm of ants, to them attacking her.  And then she came back to the nettle story.

    Part of the discharge instructions were to NOT soak or shower in hot water this week, because heat worsens the allergic reaction.  Remember what Mom’s first response was this afternoon?   No wonder her ankles were fire engine red.  Now the question is if I can keep her out of hot water all week.