h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Just gave her her supper.

She looks very haggard and drawn, but held in there for seconds and desert.

Better today than yesterday.

It's good that your mum is eating.

My mum lost her appetite completely during the hot weather. It was so difficult to maintain her weight at such times.


lil x

She still needs to put on a little weight, still very emaciated.

It's so very difficult

People often liken old age to a "second childhood"...

With a difference, though life has its ups and downs, in old age the net trend is down.

W 17 Jul 2013, ~3:45am PDT





My mom has got two breathing machines now, a cpap machine which supplies breathing air at elevated pressure and an oxygen machine that feeds elevated oxygen into the system.

Not as good as a good aerobics regimen, perhaps, but beyond a certain age that becomes increasingly impractical.

Thankfully, her health insurance covered everything.




She fought the device at first, had trouble adjusting to wearing a breathing mask.

Most people do have some initial trouble adjusting, I think.

She's sleeping more than twice as much as before, its easy now to see her chest rising and falling when she breathes, where it was nearly impossible before.

She still cries out a lot in her sleep, still walks in her sleep, needs help and support whenever she moves at the moment.

Yesterday, she had a flashback experience during which she was apparently re-experiencing giving birth.

When she came out of it, I asked if she remembered having the flashback experience and she said that she did.

That was rather heartening.

On past occasions she's had flashback experiences, she's generally remembered nothing.

She still has frequent falling incidents, usually when walking in her sleep (or trying to).

It takes a lot of time for this kind of treatment regimen to work, usually the doctors budget a year before the first re-evaluation.




biggrin Her appetite has more than doubled since she started using the cpap, she's eating normal sized meals now and frequently asking for more.

She was on elevated oxygen a couple of months before the cpap and that alone did not produce any appreciable effect on her appetite.

She was eating so little I was afraid she was going to starve herself to death.




I've had my own cpap since 2008, elevated air pressure only.

The first thing I noticed after a preliminary phase getting used to sleeping with a breathing mask on was that it was much easier to breath while I was sleeping.

The next thing, after about six months, was that my blood changed color.

It had been black at the beginning of the treatment regimen, had been for years, and it turned red again, which it hadn't been since my early forties.

On the black blood, some might call it 'blue', but definitely not an ultramarine, more like prussian blue or charcoal black with a little gloss.

From accounts I've seen, something affecting chronic workaholics given to long and sustained high levels of physical exertion resulting in depletion of oxygen in the blood and the color change.

From my own experience, physically move five or ten tons of military material per day with sheer muscle over a long term and eventually it catches up with one.




One of the accounts I've seen had to do with a TV star who did a great deal of the physical production work associated with her show herself.




Also a significant possibility the syndrome may be associated with hyperkinetic physiology.




Took my Mom to the doctor yesterday, got a referral for follow up treatment on her sleep disorder and expect a call or visit from a social worker today.




I think her appetite was perhaps in decline on account of very low rates of aerobic exertion drastically reducing available oxygenation in her blood.

She's almost unable to move about without assistance at present, though her condition has had its ups and downs that way since her heart attacks and stroke.