My mum isn't well

So, my mum is pretty sick. For as long as I can remember, she was always really heavy, to the point of being diagnosed morbidly obese. Then, two or three years ago, she had a gastric band fitted.

You might know what that is, but if you don't, essentially it's a band that is surgically fitted around your stomach, which prevents overeating. Despite a few hiccups with my mum's post-op treatment (thanks a lot NHS and your post-treatment infections) things went fine, and she's lost pretty much all of the weight she's wanted to.

Recently though, she's been feeling really sick. Not only has she been feeling nauseus, but she's been struggling to keep any food down at all, and her Gall Bladder has been causing her serious pain. Following some investigations and tests, it turns out that her blood count and haemoglobin levels are dangerously low. This last part is particularly odd given that she's been talking Iron tablets as a matter of course since her band was fitted.

She was having her regular check up a week or two ago, and the surgeon who had fitted her band decided that she needed to get some tests done as soon as possible, so they could figure out what was going on, because it was lookingincreasingly serious. Cut to this morning, and my Dad sends me a text telling me that he was taking my mum into hospital. I called him up, and he pass me over to my mum, who told me that she'd been to her local GP this morning, who has told her she should go straight into hospital this morning, given that she's gotten steadily worse to the point where she can't keep any food down, and is as white as a sheet.

My mum was supposed to have been scheduled in for an Endoscopy the last time she spoke to her surgeon, so they could find out what was going on, but it turns out that it was never booked. According to the doctors, it seems likely that my mum is bleeding internally somewhere, perhaps her stomach, but the cause is unknown at the moment. What is quite worrying is that my mum is really weak just now, not having been able to eat properly recently, and her low blood levels mean that any kind of surgery would be extremely dangerous for her.

Watch this space.