Rough Tuesday morning...
...although as the day aged it mellowed. I won't go into it now; I'm too tired and I've got a 0900 appointment tomorrow to check out some charity wheelchairs and walkers. I've decided to stop fooling around with commercial companies that try to pass off defective equipment as functioning equipment in order to thin their malfunctioning inventories and have Hospice/Medicare pay for the privilege. I've found this great equipment guy through the local branch of a national charity that has a marvelous storeroom, loves to talk equipment, will tinker with his stuff in order to try to come up with what "you" need and is congenially hilarious, to boot.
    Since my mother's care has ratcheted up yet another few notches and I'm not sure when I'll get an adequate block of time to even partially restore my files to my Mac, today I decided to download an FTP client on this PC, today, and have begun filling in the missing test results. Just shaking my head on this one. There's no such thing as catching up when you're a caregiver. Why even bother to pretend that there is?
    The Hospice physician to whom we've been assigned showed up today. I'm fairly impressed with her and Hospice's light touch medical policies. There are several things I want to mention that I've learned, though, partly through the doctor's visit and partly through the nurses visit, so that none of this will come as a surprise to anyone who is considering Hospice care for a relative and might stumble across this site. Some of those items, posted as reminders to me, are:

• Hospice and The Dying Game, including a sub-item about what happens if you don't die on time;
• Prescription protocol, especially (but not exclusively) if the prescription isn't related to the disease that qualifies the client for Hospice;
• The role of the physician in Hospice constrasted with the role of the RN (or FPN or whatever one is assigned; we still haven't met ours, yet);
• What I'm learning about the best approaches to utilizing Hospice services.

    Mom and I seem to have carried a shared cold away from the rehab facility. In reflection this afternoon I realized, hmmm...it's been about a week and a half, so this cold appearance shouldn't surprise me; only that my resistance was low enough to allow it to fester. I guess mine has dropped through the last month of managing Mom's facility care. Mom is handling this cold much better than the last. I'm not sure if its affecting her physical strength but I can report that she's much stronger, here at home, while fighting off this cold than she was fighting off the other two she caught while at the facility.
    I have got to get to bed. Guess I'd better set the alarm for the morning. Ai, yi, yi. I'm hoping for a quiet day, here shortly. On the very bright side, the monsoon rains have begun. We had a wonderful one this afternoon.
    Later.
- posted by Gail Rae @ 01:29   email  this post