Earlier quoted context omitted.
Take heart. My wife almost died early this year from a hospital deciding to rush her Sodium level restoration because beds were scarce and profitable. She now suffers from extreme anxiety, her previous life as a happy, well-balanced mom is over, and as I write, she’s in the next room chattering in nonsense to herself because it’s how her brain copes. It’s worse in the mornings, gets better, briefly, in the afternoons…
I hope your Christmas has been a good one. I am curious, what exactly happened to your wife? What is sodium level restoration and why did it have such an impact? I understand if you don’t want to go into it.
You need a certain level of sodium in you - typically around 135-145 mEq/L. The body expects this level in a similar fashion to the way it expects a certain temperature, it’s where it works best and as you go farther away from this optimal value, the body starts to suffer. My wife’s level was 121.
In fact the body can manage reasonably well over a wider range, as long as the value changes slowly, slowly because the level of sodium controls, via osmotic potential, transport across the blood/brain barrier.
So the hospital should have added a maximum of 6-8 mEq/L per day into my wife’s bloodstream via intravenous saline. That would have given her body time to adjust, slowly, to the new sodium concentrations. Instead they initially gave her 13 mEq/L in 12 hours, and then another 6 mEq/L in the next 12 hours, by their own test results. She went clinically non-responsive (ie: near-comatose) for 2 days after they did that.
Sudden sodium changes can result in edema (which can be fatal) or osmotic demyelination - the myelin sheath being a wrapper around nerve cells that allows rapid electrical transmission from nerve to synapse. Losing the myelin is “a bad thing”, see Parkinson’s Disease, Multiple Sclerosis etc.
She woke up after they tried to “reboot her brain” and gave her Prozac, then discharged her because she could “walk” with a walker for help. They subsequently put her on benzodiazaprenes in the (9? I lose track) times we came back to ER over the next month or so. She’s still struggling to get off those, though she has halved the dose they prescribed (1mg Ativan every 4 hours).
We can’t even sue the hospital, because we spent the last 9 months trying desperately to figure out what went wrong and if it can be fixed, and we only got 6 months to file any dispute because it’s a county hospital. I spell it out as simply as I can above, but finding out what went wrong was a gradual thing. We have appealed this, but I don’t hold out much hope.
All told, I am singularly unimpressed with the American “healthcare” system to date.