Grandma almost died. Heart beating disrupted by Magnesium Deficiency!
We had a big scare. My grandmother almost died today. Heart beating disrupted. She wouldn’t wake up while being picked up by the driver. From the nannie’s description, she was pale, her lips darkened, she felt cold, her saliva drooling, and it took them many minutes just to wake her up.
Probably in the attempt to wake her up and lifting her to the car re-awakened her heart to beat and in the car she started being conscious.
Her sister said the best hospital to go to was Heart Center so there they went.
At the ER, they waited 2 hours before the blood test results came in.
Dra. Gonzales, resident doctor in the ER says that Nanay has magnesium deficiency. Her explanation was that the magnesium deficiency caused a disruption in her electrical signals which included her heart. Thus her heartbeat became irregular.
Looking back, in the car, they took her blood pressure and it read 150 / 110. Put 1 and 1 together with the heart disruption, when the heart started pumping again while in the car, it was trying to make up for lost time, to pump blood into the brain and circulate everything again, that may explain for the high blood pressure reading… simply because it was needed at that time.
So the big culprit is magnesium deficiency, which she could have been suffering for from quite some time. Magnesium deficiency is connected with constipation, her twitching / tremors, nerve signals to her legs.
Nanay and I had lots of time to talk while in the ER, she is very much awake, very smart, very much conversational.
She says the real reason she wanted to go home to Makati is because “namamahay siya”, her sleep is not deep and comfortable in a strange bed, she is looking for a familiar bed. Although she sleeps at 8:30pm in her sister’s house, her sleep is not continuous, not deep and not satisfying.
She and I confirmed that the upper part of her body from her torso up are strong and movement is not impaired. She still had quite a good grip on her, not bad from being rushed to the ER and not given anything yet. She is not really weak. It is her legs that are the problem. From the hips down, her legs just will not move on command, nor will her toes. So it is not about weakness, it is about nerve signals.
Hopefully those nerve signals can be restored. Maybe with nutrition and mechanical means. She says she has a phobia with chiropractors as the 1st and only chiropractor she went to in the past caused her unbearable pain.
So at 4pm she was given some magnesium diluted in dextrose intravenously. By 5:30 her nannie called me and she was being discharged.
We were able to leave by 8pm? Too much rain and traffic.
Her prescription was for 1 tiny aspirin per day for 30 days and 1/2 tablet of Enalapril 10mg for 30 days. Remember, just for 30 days. Not forever. Unlike the previous drugs she abused. I suspect she was misled and self medicating idiotically. I made it clear to her that she should forget all her previous drugs. She feels good, a placebo effect, which is good about these 2 new tiny drugs.
I made it clear with Nanay that her problem is magnesium deficiency and to solve her problem for the long term we were to source magnesium from food. The best is raw food from fruits and raw green vegetables including raw sprouts. She says yuck to raw. So I told her you can steam or half cook your vegetables, but they are just characterized as below good. Since she says yuck to raw vegetables, I gave her spirulina tablets, take 15 tablets a day as food, it has lots of magnesium. Also I gave her Dr. Tam’s Live Green, a combination of wheat grass, barley and kamut. I also gave her a spem health barley drink which is sweatened, which she may be able to like more. I also gave gingko biloba tablets she needs 4 tablets a day to help improve her blood circulation. I also left 2 small bottles of my cayenne tincture / sili tincture for emergencies. I told the nannie that should another crisis like this morning happen, she was to jam 1 bottle full in Nanay’s mouth then take nanay to the hospital. The cayenne tincture will open up blood vessels, give her a jolt of vitamin C and will wake up dead people.
It was 10pm when we arrived at her daughter’s place in Makati. With her daughter on a trip abroad, there were no vegetables in the kitchen. We inspected the refrigerator and found 1 sayote and 1 rotten bitter melon. Nothing else. So I gave money to her nannie to buy in the morning fresh vegetables, just good for 2 days. The Guadalupe market is the nearest from their village, 1 ride via jeep or MRT. I told her nannie to begin with monggo sprouts tomorrow.
I scheduled nanay to visit Dr. Divina Hey-Gonzales tomorrow 2pm. But later in the evening she changed her mind saying she was very tired and requested we reschedule that doctor visit to the following day. She knows how she feels so I’ll have to cancel tomorrow’s appointment and hope that the next day is available.
Before I left my grandmother said she had a headache and asked if she could take ibuprofen, a drug that conceals headaches. I said, absolutely not. I read the warnings at the back loudly at her so she knows how bad that idiotic ibuprofen drug is. I told her to just drink up and go to sleep.
It’s been very tiring for me these past few days from caring for her back and forth, the resignation of my website editor so I am training a new editor, and the crash of a computer server hard drive (this one). I need some rest myself.