Numb

Today is the day when we can request a Home Health Aide! However, Mom woke up earlier than usual this morning with her Depends® disposable underwear, pajamas, padding, and sheets all soaking wet. Dad and I have to go through the ordeal of trying to change her ourselves. Mom is lying askew on the bed with the Depends® disposable underwear and pajama bottoms half-on, half-off, but she won't cooperate enough for them to be pulled all the way up or for us to get her straightened on the bed. She also would not raise-up or roll over enough for me to get a pad underneath her, so the sheets and mattress pad will be soaked if she pees herself again while lying there. She flatly accused Dad and me, believe it or not, about not having any compassion for her since we tried to move her while she is in pain. She is not in her right mind — a show of non-compassion would be to let her lie there all day in pee-soaked clothes and linens until she gets a rash from it, and neither Dad nor I are that lazy or heartless. I hope the Home Health Nurse will assist us in getting Mom more completely dressed, pad undereneath her, and in a more normal position in the bed.

This morning, she ate five bites of oatmeal, four bites of pound cake, and drank aqbout 8 ounces of apple juice. At least that is more than she ate or drank all day yesterday.

The Home Health nurse (Carolyn) came by this afternoon and I gave her a written list of all the food and drink Mom has had since her discharge from the hospital. Carolyn was appalled at how little it was. She went into the bedroom and saw how Dad and I were only able to pull the Depends® disposable underwear halfway up Mom's butt. She started to pull them up the rest of the way (as only a nurse apparently knows how to do) when she realized that Mom's clothing was wet again, as were a second set of sheets. She asked didn't we think of putting a pad under Mom, and I told her that we usually do put one under her, but she would not cooperate today for the few seconds it would take to do it. The nurse shook her head in a commiseration of our efforts, and began the task of getting the wet undies and pajamas off Mom.

Even though my father was the only other person in the house and he was in the den, Carolyn closed the door to the bedroom to make Mom feel more at-ease. She did this without my mother's even having to ask and announced, "Okay, now it's just us girls." Mom seemed pleased, so I told Carolyn the story that happened recently when Mom's pajama top fell open and she was horrified. I told her, "Mom, I have them, too, and Dad can't see, so what's the big deal?" and she laughed. In no time at all, Carolyn had clean disposable undies on Mom. I reached for the pajama bottoms, but Carolyn said to just leave them off for now. Mom pulled the same "You're killing me! Stop!" line when Carolyn and I rolled Mom over, but Carolyn just calmly had everything done so quickly and professionally that Mom couldn't really argue when all was finished. I was so relieved to be working with someone who knew how to do this, and with someone with whom Mom would not argue as much as she does with Dad and me. Carolyn checked Mom's blood pressure, pulse rate, oxygen-intake level, and spent a little time trying to get Mom to eat a little something before she left. In a brief moment at the door, she agreed that Mom was being unreasonably manipulative.

I had showered right before Carolyn arrived and got all  dressed to go out this afternoon after Carolyn left. We need more Depends® disposable underwear and a couple of other things, plus I had to run some mail by the post office and take a bag of garbage to the dump. Came home and cooked supper. Dad and I had a Boca® meatless "chicken" pattie and some killer mac-and-cheese. After we ate, I took a lovely little piece of baked fish to Mom with some mac-and-cheese and her evening meds. She refused to open her mouth to take them, so Dad had to *gently* force them into her mouth. She took a sip of the iced tea I had brought her, but I honestly don't know if she ever swallowed the pills or not. She refused to eat even one bite of the fish or mac-and-cheese.

The frightening thing is that she looked at me with this wide-eyed stare like she didn't know who I was, or was either angry as hell at me; I couldn't decide which. So, I just tured and walked out of the room to clean up the fucking kitchen. Now I feel emotionally numb.



I have them, too — a little peek at "the girls" for the boys.
And for the lovely ladies who like that sort of thang...  







© 2008 Sapphire Words @ Blogspot.com

Give us this day

For brunch, Mom ate two bites of an over-easy egg and drank four ounces of apple juice. That's it. She asked for the egg — and toast,too — and I prepared them exactly as I have done for her in the past. After her two bites of egg, however, she started yelling about how "horrible" it was and demanded that Dad take it away. There was no cheese in her breakfast, only an over-easy fried egg and a piece of toast, but she mistakenly thought the yolk of the egg was cheese refused to believe otherwise. She insisted, "I know what cheese looks like, and that is cheese, and it is horrible!" She wouldn't even take a bite of the toast she had requested.

Changing her clothes & bedding was as big an ordeal as it always has been. I can hardly wait for tomorrow when we can request a Home Health Aide.

One of the ladies at Mom & Dad's church enjoys baking homemade bread, and often brings loaves of freshly-baked bread for the folk there. When I saw Dad coming in the door with a small bag in his hand, I knew Mrs. Campbell had been baking again!

Mom took her evenings meds, but refused to eat any supper. Evenings are not good for her to interact with the real world, as her own little world holds too much sway.



I was telling at least one reader of this blog about the computer carts that the hospital has for staff to wheel their computers about from room-to-room. Each cart has a space for the CPU, keyboard, flat-screen monitor, and a WiFi anmtenna thingie. From anywhere they are within the facility, they're connected to the hospital's network without having to schlep a laptop!







© 2008 Sapphire Words @ Blogspot.com

Dead weight

Mom had a good brunch this morning — one egg over easy, a piece of toast made from Arnold's potato bread, about 4 ounces of apple juice with her morning meds, and about 6 ounces of an 8-ounce BOOST® drink. She refused to even try to sit up in bed to eat it, though, because she said she was hurting too badly. So, I stood beside the bed and fed it to her, bite by bite, as if I were Mama Bird feeding my baby bird. It was good to see her eating again, even if it had to be fed to her instead of her feeding it to herself.

There is no doubt that we need a Home Health Aide to assist in changing Mom each day. Whenever she wets her Depends® disposable underwear, it is always a two-hour ordeal — literally, no exaggeration — to wrestle Mom's pajamas & wet Depends® off her body, put on a clean set, and get her off the bed long enough to change the padding & sheets underneath her. No matter how we try to roll her over or lift her, she complains that the pain is so intense that it is "killing" her. She begs Dad and me to leave her alone and let her rest, but we have no intention of leaving her lying in pee-soaked clothing on a pee-soaked bed. It isn't sanitary, it isn't humane, and has to be cleaned-up and changed. She refuses to help in any way, so it is like lifting a dead weight. It is freaking ridiculous. So, on Monday, I am requesting the Home Health Aide, whether she likes it or not. It simply has to be done.

I got four of Mom's pills in her at suppertime, but she refused to open her mouth for the last few, or for any food whatsoever. She kept saying things like, "Give me a minute" and "Don't rush me!" but never complied. So, all the food & drink she had today was what she had at brunch. Sheesh. 

Then one of her brothers calls and Dad hands the phone to Mom. She looks at it for a moment like she doesn't know what to do with it, puts it to her ear and says nothing. Dad lets her know that the cordless phone is turned on and all she has to do is say, "Hello." She snarls at Dad, "I know what to do with a phone!" She finally greets her brother, pauses a moment while he asks about her, and then she says, "Oh, I'm doing okay." 

The doorbell rang late in the afternoon and a lady from the church (Ellie Gardiner) had stopped by with a big container of soup, a sleeve of crackers, and four slices of homemade pound cake. Wow! I already had supper going, so I will fix the soup for our lunch tomorrow.

Now some snippets of Life with Dad...

 Dad lost his dentures. He told me this morning that while I was at the pharmacy yesterday getting Mom's discharge prescriptions filled, his dentures were bothering him. So, he took them out, wrapped them in a paper towel, and placed them on a table in the hospital room. Since I wasn't there to see him do this and remind him of them when we took Mom home, he left them behind. I immediately placed a phone call to the nurse's desk this morning in hopes that housekeeping had found them when the room was cleaned, but we never got a call back saying they had been found. Dad says he can't afford a new set. 

 Dad woke me up this morning coming through the living room on his way to church. I told him it was Saturday, not Sunday. He was embarrassed that he had the days wrong, but our days have been so mixed-up lately with Mom in the hospital, that it's no wonder this happened. Heck, if my watch didn't tell me what day it was, I might have had it wrong, too.

 Dad has the annoying habit of waiting until I in the middle of something to want my help with something else. For example, he knew I was in the kitchen late this morning, preparing lunch for him and me while Mom was still asleep in bed. I was prepared to fix something different for her later when she woke. However, within five minutes of my having lunch ready for Dad and me, he goes into the bedroom, wakes Mom from her slumber, and then announces to me that Mom is ready to eat right then! He does this sort of thing so often that I decided to teach him a lesson. I immediately halted our lunch and began to prepare Mom's, take it back to the bedroom, and feed it to her while letting Dad know that I would finish fixing his lunch in an hour or so after Mom had been fed. 



A happy little butterfly, perched on the side of a white rose in a flower arrangement sent to Mom.




© 2008 Sapphire Words @ Blogspot.com

This FNP truly rocks

Mom was very alert again this morning and talked to Dad and me with no confusion in her speech or thought-patterns!  She also worked with the Physical Therapists today and did walk and do the exercises without any problem or complaint! She did complain of pain afterwards, though, so we put her back in bed rather than the recliner. Before long, she had to use the bathroom, so the nurse unhooked her IV tube so that Dad and I could escort Mom to the bathroom. She was a little unsteady on her feet, but made it all the way to the bathroom and back to bed without much grumbling.

The issue of dehydration (the major thing that landed Mom back in the hospital this time) is under control and the urinary tract infection is also under control. Those two things, coupled with the fact that Mom seemed better today has led the hospital staff to plan for her discharge this afternoon.

I spoke with the Family Nurse Practitioner (the one with the awesome skirt collection) at length today about Mom's medicines and about my misgivings about her being at home again, lest we have a repeat of what happened last time. She save us lots of advice, and we had a good conversation about what to do. She said that having Mom transferred to a rehab facility is an option, but the familiar surroundings of home would probably be easier for a 77-year-old woman to handle; the unfamiliar environment of a rehab facility would likely cause more confusion than we had seen previously, not less. Having a Home Health Aide come in daily to bathe Mom and help feed her will be ultimately easier than having Dad and me try to handle it — plus, she is MUCH more responsive to strangers than she is to Dad and me (a phenomenon that is reportedly common among individuals needing this level of care). A short run of antibiotics should ensure that the urinary tract infection is completely gone. The addition of one medication to Mom's daily regimen should stimulate her appetite so that she will eat more normally. The removal of one medication from her daily regimen should take care of the indigestion/heartburn problem Mom's had for the past few months. Two other medicines in her daily regimen might have contributed to her dehydration problem and will be discontinued until her recovery is more complete.  So, that's what we're gonna do, take Mom home, arrange for visits from the Home Health nurse & therapist to continue, arrange for a Home Health aide to come by for bathing/feeding assistance, get the new prescriptions filled, and tweak her medication regimen accordingly.

So, we will be driving back home this afternoon, slightly earlier than usual, which is good because — although the town where my parents live is small (official population in the 2000 census was 3,000) — downtown becomes a little congested every Friday night during the school year as the mighty, mighty Blue Flame burns the competition on the football field.




© 2008 Sapphire Words @ Blogspot.com

Frustration

Mom was sitting up in bed this morning when Dad & I arrived at the hospital. She looked and sounded much more alert today than she has in a long time, thankfully. Her breakfast tray had already been removed by the Food Service staff, but she reported that she had eaten "a good breakfast" but wasn't able to remember what was on the tray or the quantity that she had consumed. She said she needed to use the bathroom, so two nurses came in and assisted her to the bathroom where she peed a good quantity (judging from the sound of it, which drifted through the almost-closed bathroom door). Although she wanted to return to the bed  — of course  — the nurses convinced her that she really needed to sit up in the chair for a bit. Not long after they got her settled, she requested another dose of medication for the pain, which they administered. Shortly afterwards, she drifted off into a fitful sleep in the chair, waking periodically for brief moments to ask about noises in the hallway, etc.

When lunch arrived, we could not get her to wake up enough to eat, so we kept her tray off to the side so it would not be collected. She finally work up sometime later, almost mid-afternoon, and one of the nurses and Dad managed to force her to eat about three bites of the "Lemon Baked Trout" and a couple of bites of her dinner roll, plus she drank a few sips of her iced tea. That was all she would eat, but at least it was something.

After being given more medication for pain at her request, she drifted off to sleep again until the Physical Therapists arrived. She complained when they insisted that she needed to walk with them, but finally allowed them to help her to a standing position and grabbed onto the walker. She would not take any steps, however. Each time they instructed her to move her feet and take a tiny step forward, she just slowly leaned into the walker with her head bent way down towards the floor. They asked her if she was looking at something, and she stood up straight again and replied, "Of course I'm looking at something!" When they asked what she was looking at, she just closed her eyes and didn't respond. It almost looked like she went to sleep again standing there beside them. The whole scenario repeated a time or two, and they could never get her to take a single step.

They finally gave up on the walking and allowed her to sit down again, thinking they would try a few exercises. After asking her to extend her right leg straight out in front of her and repeating the request with much prodding a coule of times, she finally complied and did it beautifully. But when they asked her to move her other leg, she just sat there with her eyes closed. One of the therapists gently touched her left leg and repeated the request a couple of times. Without opening her eyes, Mom raised her right leg again instead of the left. Repeated requests from the therapists got no response from her whatsoever and she remained immobile with her eyes closed.

They asked her if she wanted to get back into bed and she finally roused herself long enough to answer Yes!" and let them help her over to the bed. As soon as they left, her IV started beeping. I've been watching the nurses carefully and figuring out how to check the line for kinks and which buttons on the pump to restart the IV, but this time my attempts brought no success. Even one of the nurses was unable to get it fixed, so she just turned-off the IV pump for a bit until someone else could look at it.

Based on all the events of the day so far, I am very frustrated that Mom would not eat much for us or drink much, that she was unable to work with the Physical Therpists at all today, and that she is constantly complaining of pain (even moaning in her sleep sometimes) and just not doing very well at all right now. 

Another addition to the frustrations of the day was that a cold front came through the area last night and it was 45°F on our front porch this morning, according to my outdoor thermometer. Sheesh.  At least I have a couple of warm items of clothing to wear, although most of my cold-weather clothing is back home, of course, in Tennessee. Since it was much cooler today, I decided to wear something other than my staple flip-flops. I  my pink crocs! 




© 2008 Sapphire Words @ Blogspot.com

Cake...?

What's up with the cake...???

During the week after Mom's surgery, she saw something in the room that she thought was a piece of cake and commented on how good it looked. It wasn't cake, by the way. Once she went home, she there was no mention of cake. Then in the Emergency Room a couple of nights ago, she saw some medical supplies on a shelf out in the hallway and thought it was a cake and asked for a piece. Dad and I told her that it was just medical supplies and not a cake. She was moved from the ER to a regular room in the hospital. When Dad and I walked in to see her the following morning, she straightaway told us that someone had brought in a cake ealier that morning and was planning to cut it when Dad and I arrived. Apparently we didn't arrive soon enough, so the cake was taken away, uncut. Cake. Hmmm... 

Today, Mom seems slightly more alert, thanks to the IV solution. She was sitting up in the recliner when Dad and I arrived this morning. She managed to eat a few bites of scrambled eggs, grits, and English muffin for breakfast. Later, Physical Therapists got her to the door of the room and back (about seven steps for a normal, healthy person), but she only got a little over halfway there before she tired and had to sit down. At least that is further than she's walked in the past few days. She was in pain from sitting in the chair and the walk with the therapists, so she had to lie down afterwards and asked for a pain pill in lieu of lunch. Other than some lingering mental confusion at times, she seems to be doing better, all-in-all.

And now for the inconsequentials of the day...

 When I got my nails done recently, I selected a very different color of polish than I've ever worn before — Silver Mine (see photo)! I usually opt for more traditional colors such as garnets, berries, roses, pinks, and mauves. For some reason, though, it seemed time for a change, something different and off-beat. I like it. Sometimes, change can be good.

 I dunno why Dad does this, but he has the habit of turning on multiple sources of noise at the same time, like running the television & weather radio at the same time in the den, or the FM-radio while watching the news on the television in the same room. Gawd. WTF? 

 One of the women on staff at the hospital is an FNP with the Internal Medicine department. She's made some of the daily rounds, checking on Mom and other patients. Like me, she wears skirts almost every day and has quite a collection of pretty clothing. Our tastes in colors, patterns, and styles are quite similiar, so we've had fun checking-out each others' outfits when she stops by!







© 2008 Sapphire Words @ Blogspot.com

Dehydration

Mom has been refusing to eat or drink properly the past few days. When the Home Health nurse came today, she noticed how pale and weak Mom was and witnessed first-hand some of Mom's mental confusion and stubbornness to cooperate with Dad and me in taking care of her.

The nurse has to report her findings to Mom's surgeon, of course (because it was he who ordered Home Health for Mom as a post-surgical care). The doctor was explicit with the nurse that he wanted Mom transported via EMS — not by our own car, much to my father's chagrin — to the Emergency Room so he could examine her and run some IV solution into her antecubital vein as nourishment. They are also processing urine and blood samples to make sure there is no infection or other complications with her condition.

Another phycician, who is overseeing all patients in the ER tonight stopped by and said that we needed to be sure there was always someone at the house to make Mom eat and drink properly. DUH!  With all I have done lately — leaving my own husband and home behind in Kingsport to stay long-term at Mom & Dad's house, taking over the cooking & cleaning & laundry & grocery shopping for them, keeping track of medications for Mom & Dad, chauffeuring them to appointments, as well as making honest attempts at getting Mom to eat and drink properly after her surgery and subsequent discharge — his allegations that we "...need someone at Mom & Dad's house to take care of them..." was like a slap in the face to me.Thanks for that advice, Dr. Dickwad. Next time, how about asking about the situation rather than passing judgment so quickly and then disappearing. 

Oh, and now Mom's urinalysis showed that Mom has a urinary tract infection on top of everything else that's going on. Sheesh.

Anyway, the decision was made to keep Mom for 24-48 hours, continue the IV solutions, and try to get her back on-track with pain management and exercise. How long she is kept at the hospital, as well as whether she will be discharged to a rehab facility before coming home remains to be seen.



© 2008 Sapphire Words @ Blogspot.com