Lorihadams-- hi guys...been busy!

[lorihadams]

Okay, I'm mad again. Dang nursing home.

My mama (who is a drama queen anyway) called me yesterday and said "Granny is bleeding internally and they are rushing her to the hospital right now so you better start praying"

Me "what?"

"That's all I know right now, I'll call you when I know more" click.


"what?"



I call hubby, who is setting up everything for the Patriots Day concert with Charlie Daniels and who I have not seen since Thursday, btw. He says "calm down, you know your mother and it's probably nothing, I'll call you back."

He calls me back, now DD has fallen and is bloody where she scraped her chin and I am in the middle of patching her up...."she's fine, her hemoglobin levels were low and they are probably gonna give her a blood transfusion.....she's fine."

*breathe deeply*

I just got off the phone with granny herself and she tells me that she took a lovely ride in an ambulance yesterday evening and then they sent her home. She says "it's okay, I'm still breathing....you gonna be here for the kids to see me get the stitches out?"

Yeah, she's fine. Turns out her therapy people put her on a blood thinner and her doctor put her on a blood thinner too and it caused her hemoglobin to be really low and her blood pressure to bottom out....79/49. Once all the "teams" got together, which they should have done a week ago, they got her down to one blood thinner.

I'm gonna go eat some ice cream and hug a chicken now.

 

[old fashioned]

dontcha just wish the 'professionals' would consult BEFORE prescribing meds? sheesh!

As for the kids.....all I can say is around here, life is in constant chaos and I think all our neighbors think we're deaf since there's so much yelling

 

[lorihadams]

Yep, us too....I'm really trying to quit yelling so much.....I'm trying.

Note to self.....before letting the kids take the battery powered gator down the hill to the pond make sure the battery is fully charged so you can get back up said hill. I'm exhausted and sweating from pushing them back up the hill.

 

[PamsPride]

I am glad your grandma is ok and they are getting her meds straightened out! We had a scare with my dad this week too. I called my mom every morning when I came home to milk during our camping trip and on Thursday morning when I called my mom was crying and said my dad could not get out of bed and that he was slurring his speech. It took both my mom and brother to get him into the car. His doctor just a couple blocks away said to bring him right in. By the time they checked his sugar at the doc's office it had come up to 63! He recently quit work so his eating habits have changed and he was not eating early in the morning like he used to. His sugar bottomed out. He has lost another 9 pounds since his last visit too. The doc took him off of some of his diabetes meds so that is helping.

I hope your DD heals quickly! My 8 yo took a dive on his bike this morning and has some major road rash on his face and shoulder! KIDS!!

 

[lorihadams]

Oh my gosh Pam....hope he's okay! Mine won't even touch their bikes yet...

Chad left this morning to finish cleaning up at the Patriot's day event. The bad news is that I've only seen him for 20 minutes in the last 3 days but the good news is that he came home with nearly $2000 in cash last night! That should pay off the lawnmower. Whew.

Gonna check with church this morning about some programs for the kids...they have a homeschooling hour listed on the calendar but I don't know what age groups it is for. They also have a music class on Wed nights that I'm going to start taking them to.

The dogs ran off yesterday afternoon toward the back pond and haven't come back yet. I went looking for them but haven't seen a peep of them so far. When I get back from church I'll call the pound just to make sure.

 

[lorihadams]

Yesterday my husband came home with 40 frozen chicken breasts, 200 hot dogs, a case of frozen hamburgers, 3 pork butts, a case of cole slaw, and a beef brisket.

We called lots of people and had an impromptu dinner party last night. Gave 20 chicken breasts to his cousin and his 4 kids as well as 100 hot dogs and half the hamburgers. We ate the brisket and froze the pork butts. The coleslaw is going to FIL for BIL's wedding rehearsal dinner on friday.

The patriot's day event had half a food truck leftover so they let everyone take some stuff home. Holy meat batman! They had a professional bbq place do all the meat so it was perfect! The chicken and hamburgers were precooked and preseasoned and quite frankly, I wouldn't feed them to my dogs.

Today we are going to granny's to visit for a few days. Poor hubby hasn't seen us in a week. We did have a good time visiting with 2 of his cousins and their families and some family friends last night though. Got to see the new baby H (he's 2 weeks old).

The best thing about the patriots day event was that the moving company that set up the stage and production stuff was so impressed with Chad that they want to use him in the future for other events! He told them that it will have to be on the weekends only because of his regular job but that would be fantastic if we could make some extra income that way and he had a good time doing it! He got to meet Charlie Daniels too!

 

[dacjohns]

Wow, what a score.

 

[Icu4dzs]

Patriots Day? Is that 9/11? I'd heard something about folks getting something going but had not gotten all the details. Sounds like this is going to get into our lexicon of days to consider how important our freedom is to us...which is WONDERFUL. I just hope we can teach this to the GEN X, Y and Millenium folks who are now "coming of age".

Just a note about Granny and the various "teams" ordering medications. This is a problem in medicine that has to be fixed.
This is one of the biggest reasons the Family Practice Doctor should be involved because that is who should be "coordinating care" for the patient.

In settings where there is no FP, the "Specialists" all seem to work in a cave by themselves and don't discuss anything with each other. They all write notes in a chart but no one actually reads them and puts the information into a coherent assembly of facts and comparisons. The tragedy here is the serious problems that arise as a result of so many specialists doing "their own thing" and not wanting to "answer to anyone". I think this is a big problem and the source of many of the "errors" we see in medicine. It also accounts for the outrageous costs of medical care.
The real tragedy is the reason this happens. The root cause is as you may have figured out can be traced to money.

All the insurance company's favor (read are run by)"specialists" who consider FP doc's to be braindamaged inferior distant cousins to "THE REAL DOCTORS" . (You know the ones who "actually DO something" for the patient such as cut out some important part of the body) rather than use their brain to "think through the problem" and figure out what is causing it.

What I am saying here is that the insurance company's don't pay FP's for "thinking". They only pay "specialists" for "doing something" i.e. a procedure. Why else would surgeons be so much better paid than FP's? Surgeons depend on someone else making the diagnosis so they can just repair it. Don't ask them to think. They feel that the risk of "doing something is far more valuable than figuring out what is wrong"

A good example is the following:
A woman in the ICU begins to have low blood pressure and rapid heart beat. The ICU nurse calls the FP who comes to the hospital in the late night and begins to evaluate the cause. After a short time, the FP figures out that the woman has a bleeding ulcer from the effects of the tube going in her nose to her stomach put there after her surgery earlier that week. This severe bleeding becomes more and more aggressive and requires a transfusion and several other procedures to keep the blood pressure up and prevent the woman from dying. The FP calls the surgeon and the surgeon says, "I'll come see her in the morning". The FP says, "NO, you need to come right away" The surgeon balks and says" No, I'll come later. You just keep giving her IV fluids and I'll take her to the Operating room in the morning" So, the FP spends all night in ICU working to keep the woman alive and the surgeon shows up at 9 AM the next day, takes her to the OR and repairs a bleeding ulcer in the stomach. Total surgeon time about 2 hours...fee paid by insurance company= $4000. Total FP time: 8 hours at night in the ICU. Total fee paid by MEDICARE=$40 Womans life saved: PRICELESS
Does this bring home the point?

So...the bottom line here for your granny would be to see to it that there is a doctor who is "IN CHARGE" of her care and who is coordinating all the "specialists" (akin to herding cats) and see to it that things like this don't continue to happen. By having a FP doc who consults the "specialist" rather than one specialist consulting another specialist, they would be more likely to face some form of control mechanism in an effort to eliminate that kind of issue and reduce the risk to the patient. Specialists RESIST this with all their might and strength. THEY HATE having an FP coordinating the care because the FP decides which specialist gets called, not the specialist's "best buddy". You can see how that affects the situation when the FP makes those decisions instead of the other specialists.

If people got angry enough to create "Patriots Day" for 9/11, they certainly could get angry enough to put pressure on insurance companies to pay Family Doctors for one of the things they do best...i.e. coordinate the patient's care so these things don't continue to happen. This one change in the dynamics of patient care (read REVOLUTIONIZE and IMPROVE)

I'll get off my soap box now...
Best
Trim sends

 

[lorihadams]

I agree.

She is still having blood in her stool and has an appt Monday for that. Went to her surgeon yesterday and got the staples out of her leg. The thing that kills me is that she has had blood in her stool for almost a week now. What are they waiting for?

Her nurses in the nursing home/rehab center are so understaffed that I had to go find one when the lady next door got up on her own to go to the bathroom (cause she had rung the nurse bell 4 times and no one showed up) and ended up falling. One of the nurses came to get her but needed help and yelled several names down the hallway but no one came. They were all doing paperwork in the rec room down the hall and couldn't hear her cause one of the patients had turned the volume up on the tv.

Half the time they don't even know what's going on and they will admit it to you. My mom told them that this stuff needed to be on her chart and her nurse said, I agree. So why don't they put it on there. She's allergic to codeine and what did they give her in the hospital....codeine.

I'm to the point that if anything happens to me I'll get hubby to stitch me up and pray. I hate doctors.

And the bad thing is that her other knee is just as bad and needs to be done too but because of all the crap that has happened with this one she'll never go back and get it done and I can't say that I blame her.

 

[lorihadams]

So we are home....got 3 loads of laundry on the line and are getting ready for a playdate this afternoon and then the rehearsal dinner for BIL's wedding.

Hubby says he will watch the kids so I can go get a hair cut and try to find something to wear for this dang wedding. It's at 4:30 so I guess I need to wear a dress.

I'm not a girly girl at all. We are seriously ticked off at BIL cause he has been ordering everyone around and gave his father a list of things to do at his house while he was getting a massage. Pressure washing, cleaning the garage, mowing the grass...etc. I could seriously him right now.

I am hating the nursing home right now.....they don't know what's going on, the doctors are not talking to each other and granny has had blood in her stool for almost a week now and no one has done anything about it. You ring the bell for a nurse and no one comes for an hour (at best) and when they do they are not very happy about being there. She does have 2 very good nurses that we just love but they are night nurses. Her day nurses are crapola.

I just hope everything is okay. She is supposed to go to the gastro doctor monday, I think. Who knows anymore.