by Terri Odland

Created on: June 25, 2008

My mother went to the emergency room on a friday Feb 5th,2008, where she was diagnosed with Congestive heart failure (CHF). The Physicians stated that she was having severe regurgitation and she needed surgery right away. Before sugery they ran a few more tests to check the status of her heart damage and then made plans for her surgery. She was scheduled for open heart surgery that following tuesday.

My mother was never better after the surgery. We were in and out of the hospital,until the last time she went in, this was the day before mothers day,Saturday May 10th,2008. She was admitted for fluid overload just like the last 3 times before, after 2 weeks of the doctors tryng to treat the symptoms of CHF, they told us that she was dying and that they didn't
know what else to do for her,so she was put on the DNR list and they were going to take her out of the critical care unit and move her to the main hospital floor so we could then make other arrangements for the remainder of her days.
During all of mom's hospitalizations, there were other complications of her health revealed, she had ulcers in her small intestines that were causing her to have GI bleed,that led her to having multiple transfusions (7 units not inluding the 5 recieved during her surgery),intestinal blockage,electrolyte imbalance,malnutrition ect.. My mom went from being a hard working,active women to eating ice chips and lying in bed 24 hrs a day.
On May 23rd,2008 her Cardiologist came in her room and said he was on the phone with Emory and that he thought she needed to be transferred there. We knew that he didn't understand why her health had deteriorated so fast and he didn't understand why she wasn't responding to treatments that other patients would have had positive results with.
On May 24th we were sent to Emory in Atlanta, My sister and I followed her ambulance there,mom had become very frightened through all the news that she was having to process,and now we were on our way to an unknown territory,not sure what to expect from the new group of doctors we were about to meet.
Mom was only there a week before they came in and told us the news of what their studies had found. It was a disease called "Amyloidosis", we had never heard of this before and my mom and I both have worked in the medical field for 20 years. this turned out to be the worst news because there was nothing they can do for this type of illness, and to make things worse the doctors had performed more extensive testing to see

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