Two very frustrating days have passed, after which we did get to come home.

I had not mentioned they had tried to send James to dialysis, but his blood pressure was too low (at least when they tried to do the dialysis) to do so. He was seriously ticked because "transportation" never showed up to take him back to the room and he was cooling his heels up in the dialysis clinic for over an hour. The nurse and a floor tech finally had to go up and get him. This was just an example of the tiny problems we had here during our stay.

Another example? On Sunday morning the room phone rang. It was Dr. Jackson from Kaiser, who was ringing James' room in a fruitless attempt to get in touch with someone at Wellstar to arrange for the followup care after James was released. He said he'd called several days and no one answered, and he was calling the room in the hopes that James' nurse was there. I paged the nurses' station and told them James' doctor was on the phone and wanted to talk to "Amy." I then chatted on the phone with the doctor for twenty minutes. No one ever showed up.

So Sunday dawned and doctors started parading in and out of the room. They all examined James—the cardiologist, the urologist, and the nephrologist—and said he could go home today! So he ate breakfast. And lunch. And supper. The nurse even came in to remove the catheter so he could go home (a notion we disabused her of, as much as James didn't want to go home with the damn thing). And when shift change came the new nurse says no, it's going to be tomorrow. I wanted to throw things. I did beat up a pillow when the room was empty.

Monday he did go home (during rush-hour traffic, natch), after two meals had been served, and I had a lousy lunch (some nitwit put cheese on my steak-and-cheese wrap, even though the written order said no cheese), although it wasn't as bad as last night's supper, which was chicken breast and roast potatoes, and the former made me so nauseated I couldn't finish it. The pulmonologist finally waltzed through and gave him an attaboy that she only told to me (his lungs sounded really good) and I guess that was our last hurdle because after the food they started talking about having talked to Kaiser (FINALLY),  they pulled the IVs and got James some bags for the catheter and all the junk and James finally got stuffed into Twilight and the three of us got to go home.

And because hospitals are where you get no rest at all, James fell completely asleep during the episode of Call the Midwife we missed last night because the hospital cable system gets no PBS stations at all. Lord knows he needed it.

All I hope is that we are taking care of this catheter okay. We asked for some instruction on keeping things clean before we went home and never got it. The discharge papers says he can shower with it, so I hope soap and water are good enough.

Labels: health, sickness

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:20:00 PM

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