i flew in from florida last night. i won’t talk too much about the wad of 12 year olds sitting around us, and their three adult “advisers” who didn’t manage to advise them to settle down and be quiet and stop kicking and waking other passengers until we were landing in sfo.
i saw grandma almost daily in florida. she made a remarkable improvement while i was there. one of my aunts said, “we’re thinking the m-word,” right after i arrived (that’s m-iracle). no one could believe she would last the week yet when i saw her sunday morning on my way to the airport, she was sitting up in her chair. or, rather, she was in her chair leaned back and would sometimes sit up to ask a question.
her eyesight is almost completely gone and she keeps her left eye closed in hopes that doing so will mean she’ll be able to see more when she does open it. she doesn’t want pain meds because she says they make her hallucinate, but she’s in a LOT of pain. we’ve found oxycontin (is that how it’s spelled? the one everyone gets addicted to.)… we’ve found that works well for her, but the hospice won’t let US ask for it, it has to come from grandma, who forgets that it doesn’t have the unpleasant side effects. so we talk her into it every couple days, she says she feels better, then we tell her it’s because of the pain meds, she expresses surprise, then only remembers the bad experiences by the time the pain comes back. or thinks she shouldn’t ask for some other reason (she doesn’t want to be a bother, etc.).
she’s supposed to go home today! not because she’s well enough to live at home, really, but because of some missteps at the hospital before she was released to hospice. apparently, she was released 6 hours short of the time required for medicare to pay the first 100 days of her nursing home. now, six hours in a hospital is not a lot of time. we’re not talking a whole day, even. i’ve been “lost” in a hospital for a couple hours before. (i was where i was supposed to be, but they didn’t look all the way in the room and claimed i was gone.) so, the big question is why didn’t anyone in-the-know notice? we didn’t even know, at the time, about the requirement.
so, dad and unc spent a couple days negotiating with someone who wants very much to be important and influential, but is instead the social worker assigned to families at a small florida hospice. and while i can say with certainty that he will be remembered and talked about by this family, it’s not going to be in the way most people would like that for themselves. my aunt very directly and very plainly gave him what-for when she thought she was leaving the hospice for the last time. (she told him the meeting with him was worse than any meeting with an inept school psychologist she’d ever had in her 32 years of teaching.) this dude had us convinced our only option was to take grandma home immediately because the hospice was all out of pocket, in a car because the ambulance ride would be so expensive, and try to care for her with what we had there. OR pay out of pocket for a nursing home which we couldn’t even really pick ourselves. at one point he told the family HE would decide what would happen and then actually had the gall to ask how much money the rest of the family has. (not, will you be able to help your mother pay for this and how much support are you able to give, but - how much do you have in the bank?) and said, “blah blah blah, rich families like you, blah blah blah” !!!
after talking to his supervisor we found that all hospice care is covered, that includes the rental of home health equipment. in fact, they wouldn’t let us take her home without first having a hospital bed, table, and bedside toilet (at least) delivered to her house. a home care nurse called and will meet with everyone still there about how to empty the catheter bag, change sheets, wash grandma… etc. also, the ambulance ride from the hospice to home is covered. the supervisor stopped at one point in the conversation with dad and unc and said, “i take it this is all a surprise to you?”
so, huge improvement from friday’s belief that we were taking her home, completely unprepared, by car.
dad, however, already returned her wheelchair so he’s going to have to go re-rent that.