Robin rising

Robin had a restful Thursday until about 10:30pm. We had just finished giving her the bedtime meds through her stomach tube when she woke up. She woke rather quickly and began saying that she was "leaving". I thought she was making a metaphorical reference to death and in a bit of shock all I could do was ask "what do you mean?". I repeatedly asked what she meant and she kept responding she was leaving, then she made her meaning quite clear as she grabbed the side rails and started pulling herself out of bed. She was speaking loudly with her eyes wide open and she was waving away any attempt on our part to get close to her.

For days she's only been out of bed with assistance (and even then she barely shuffled her way across the floor), but now she was quite literally ready to leave under her own power. She said she "didn't want to be in the hospital anymore" and she was going home. We blocked her from getting up and said she couldn't get up without our assistance - an option she was not open to considering. Her story soon changed and she began saying that she had to go to the bathroom but she didn’t want any help. After a stand-off that lasted a five or ten minutes she lay back in bed, covered her face with her hands and started sobbing.

Over the course of about ten minutes we watched her calm down as we talked to her about taking deep breaths and relaxing. Luckily this entire episode had begun with her receiving medication so that worked in our favor. We considered this episode to be the culmination of a confusing day. We discussed whether we would awake Robin in four hours to give her more meds, but overall we figured we had dodged a bullet.

Dad volunteered to spend the night in the living room with Robin, and Kim and I would get to sleep in our beds upstairs. Robin's been sleeping through the night so we figured we were all set, but we couldn't have been more wrong.

Kim referred to this first episode as "when the $%#! hit the fan".