Yesterday, my mother's e-mail started out .. "It was wonderful to see all of you for Thanksgiving. Sorry I was so completely "out of it", but now we know why." Well, I didn't think Mom seemed out of it at Thanksgiving. I thought she was quiet because she was getting over bronchitis, they thought, or something she picked up on her excursion through the rain forest of Brazil.

Turns out there was a lot more to Mom's situation than she let on. Her inability to clot had soared to an insanely dangerous level, made her tired and woozy and left huge bruises on her legs, all of which she kept quiet about during our brief trip to Northern Virginia.

You see, Mom takes the blood thinner Coumadin , and well, I'll let her finish the story.

Mom writes, "I am telling you this story so perhaps you can sometime pass the alert on to your viewers. The drug Coumadin and antibiotics do not mix. The day after we got home from Brazil, I saw our doctor for bronchitis. He prescribed an antibiotic that made me dizzy, so after a couple of days we called his office, and I was put on levaquin. Anyway my inr that should be 2.5 soared to over 7. We did not know this until we got back from Thanksgiving, had blood work done, and got a frantic call from the nurse telling me to be careful, and of course, my medicines were changed. "

(Kathryn note: INR is a standardized measure - a blood test to check the clotting time of blood for people taking warfarin, brand name Coumadin. The value should be should be 2-3. 7 would mean her blood takes 7 times as long to clot and that's just scary)

Mom continues, " So the message is: when on Coumadin, it is the patient's responsibility to tell any doctor who prescribes any drug that you are on Coumadin. (This came from my cardiologist whom I saw as a routine check-up on the 28th.) It will be my mantra from now on. Don't know how you can sneak this information into a report."

Son of a gun if that very day- that same day- a study was being released in the Annals of Internal Medicine that just 3 drugs were responsible for many the 177,000 visits seniors (sorry, Mom) make to emergency rooms each year. And one of the 3 is, you guessed it, warfarin otherwise known as Coumadin.

The study coming out on Coumadin; Mom's request to warn viewers about Coumadin; well, something told me that was definitely the story to do on 13 News at 5 in Hampton Roads. I thought I might not be able to focus specifically on the issue of antibiotics and that one drug, but in pointing out the story of the 3 drugs- Coumadin, insulin and Digoxin creating a large number of drug reactions that lead seniors to the emergency department, I could make the point that seniors need to be proactive and make sure their doctor says it's OK to take any other drug if they're on one of the "big three"- or any drug, for that matter. And so, I did. Well, actually, I did with the help of Frances Minkin and Garnett Rainey, two Norfolk women who shared their medication issues with me.

Thanks to our blog, I can pass on Mom's message specifically. If you're on coumadin- don't take antibiotics. If your doctor doesn't know a way around it, talk to your pharmacist. And your cardiologist. There you go, Mom.

If you ever wondered about the power of the press, so to speak, now you know it just may have something to do with the "power of the PARENT" as far as what is really behind the answer to that never-ending question, "How do you decide what to report on each day?".

By the way, Mom reports that her medications were changed and she is fine.