March 25, 2013 Monday

The beauty of voice mail delivery; I just (4:50 AM) rec’d a v/m from yesterday at 11:00 PM from Jessie Life Care. They are telling me that the doctor ordered vicodin and it has codeine in it and mom is allergic to codeine. Should they proceed? OMG, what is going on?  What drug had been ordered and why did the doctor not look at her allergies history? And WHY has nothing been given to her for her pain four days later?

 I have to tell you I thought it might be someone telling me she had died. She is in bad shape. She would not get out of bed yesterday and is not eating.

What have they been giving her since Friday when I requested something more than Tylenol?

You have to figure that half of your visit to the SNF will be spent tracking down the staff and trying to find out what is going on. That is, if your patient/loved one has dementia or brain injury and cannot confirm to you what has happened or not happened to them.

I just (5:30 AM) called Hospice and Debbie will call me back.  Oh, this is priceless, now they are blaming me and said I asked for the medicine. What a bunch of BS. I asked for something more than Tylenol, they are supposed to be able to figure it out from there.

NOTE: the whole idea of hospice is that they are supposed to provide extra comfort and care to the dying patient and to provide family support. I am not feeling it. I interviewed 3 hospice companies and they all send out their best marketing teams and make wonderful promises that their staff does not or cannot fulfill. For instance last week I asked the case manager nurse when I was going to start meeting with the team? She asked what? And then determined that she would ask each individual (spiritual/home health/social) to contact me with reports…..I wonder when that will happen?

At 8:30 AM I rec’d a call from hospice saying that a nurse would go out today. She said that SNF said that they did NOT have an order from the Dr.

At 11:00 AM I receive a call from the Spiritual care Counselor at Hospice. She said that the case manager Jeanette told her to report to me when she visits. She said mom is not very receptive and I reminded her that I wanted to be there and introduce them the next time she went out. She said ok, yes we could do that sometime. And so I asked, when? Maybe next week. I again said when? Are you not committed to this? If not then I will stop asking you. But I have offered to be available any time and you are not committing to a date. What the deal? So she finally said well when is good for you and I said, no, I offered to meet your schedule and when is that? Next Tuesday at 11:00. FINE! Why does it all have to be so effing difficult?

So at 1:20 PM I get a call from the case manager and she has her “in charge now oh boy now voice going” so she recites to me what I already know and then I tell her why are we still talking about this? Just get mom the medicine and then monitor her to see if she is OK. How hard is that?

I get another call from Hospice to see if they want me to get mom a retina specialist appointment. I told her it was already handled. 

I saw mom at 4:15 PM and she was doing ok. She did not think she had any pain meds given to her and I did not find the nurse anywhere around.  I sat with her for about 20 minutes and observed that her eye is looking a bit better. I guess the pred forte drops are helping. Good news. We could use some.