The Blog of mamapolo

Today we loaded my husband into an ambulance for the strenuous trip to Pittsburgh for his follow-up appointment with the lung surgeon.

The important part of this story is that the surgeon advised us that if his progress continues at or near the same rate, after his next appointment with that doctor in three weeks, he plans to remove the feeding tube and discharge him to my care at home.

Thank you, Lord. His recovery is not yet, nor will it be, complete for a while yet, but every day the decision I made standing there looking at the psych evaluation, and discarding it as incorrect, is proven more accurate. What I thought as I looked through tears at the "dementia, likely from organic causes," diagnosis was, "Ah, but you don't know Tim."

My joy is blunted by frustration at the day's events.

Tim has had a low-grade fever off and on since last Wednesday. The rehab did blood work, and save for a slightly lowered hemoglobin count, all was well. I requested a urinalysis, and the nurse told me this morning when I asked if it had been done, to discuss it with the doctor at his appointment today.

The ambulance arrived at 12:30 for the only-optimistically-one-and-a-half-hour trip to the 2:00 pm appointment in Pittsburgh. It was snowing enthusiastically as we drove off the convent grounds. We arrived, not as late as I anticipated, at 2:20.

If the no-longer-young blonde drama queen at the registration desk had spent as much time registering folks as she did complaining about how many folks she had to register, she would have been done in a third the time. We wheeled Tim in on the ambulance gurney, and Blondie told me, as though he were a side of beef, that I should go back to Section C and ask "What they want done with him." I left the pair from the ambulance with him and did as instructed. The nurse there asked if he could sit in a wheelchair and I said yes.

I wheeled a chair back to him and we helped him from the gurney to the chair. The nurse told me to stay there and register, and she would take Tim back to Section C, where I was to join them. I reminded her that he does not remember that he is not to stand by himself, and needed someone with him to protect him from himself. She nodded impatiently and wheeled him away.

I was fretting about whether someone WAS watching him, and I remembered from our previous visit that we were all set up in the computer and nothing had needed done for registration. I told Blondie that and she gave me that harried bureaucrat glare I recognize so well and told me coolly to have a seat and I would be dealt with in my turn.

So I waited with visible impatience until the man next to me looked at me as though he suspected I might be armed and ready to take our relationship to the next level. I said, "Seriously, I used to be a nice, wait-my-turn kind of person." He laughed and said he understood.

After nearly fifteen minutes, Blondie called my name, checked her computer and said, "Oh, you're all set up. You can go on back."

Choosing not to waste the time it would have taken to blister the large pink ears that jutted out from her upswept hairdo (meow), I hustled to Section C and was directed back the hall to the first exam room.

Guess who sat there in the room, in his wheelchair, in solitary, unsupervised splendor?

I stepped out into the hall and intercepted the nurse who had taken him from me and brought him to the exam room. "I told you he needed to be watched for his safety!"

She looked at me. "I got busy," she said lamely.

"Well, thank your lucky stars that nothing happened to him," I answered. "Next time you get busy, consider how that explanation will sound in a courtroom."

She blanched and I felt a small thrill of satisfaction.

The doctor came bustling in with his lackey, who handled papers and did stuff. Almost immediately the doctor's cell phone rang, and he took the call, clearly a personal call. Twice more in the five minutes he spent with us, his cell rang, and he took the calls. Already irritated, I began to imagine how it would play when he visited a proctologist friend to retrieve the cell phone.

"How's it going?" he asked cheerily.

"I would like to point out that it was YOUR office that instructed me to make sure he had round-the-clock sitters so he didn't try to walk alone and hurt himself."

He blinked. "Yes?"

"I was stuck out in registration and your nurse wheeled his chair into this room and left him by himself, AFTER I reminded her that he needed to be watched. For about fifteen minutes. Plenty of time for another subdural hematoma or broken bone or worse."

He frowned. I didn't have the impression he was frowning because his nurse left my husband alone, but because I had the audacity to suggest it was improper procedure.

He shook it off, and asked a few questions, dictated a couple of lines to his flunky, and said Tim 'looked' stronger and he expected in three weeks 'we' could remove the feeding tube and discharge Tim to home. He emphasized that my husband had to be eating well - which he is not, yet. I requested a prescription for Megase, an appetite stimulant that worked well earlier in the summer. He thought for a moment. "That's a good idea," he said, and motioned to his aide to write that down. He smiled at Tim and shook our hands. "You're going to make it!" he told my husband.

I asked him (as instructed by the rehab nurse) about the possibility of a UTI causing the intermittent fevers and agitation. The expression on his face said clearly that he was a lung surgeon, and he did not do pee. He told me the rehab doctor would have to address that topic.

He was out of the room in minutes - most of which were taken up by his cell phone calls. With a webcam, we could have done the appointment by phone.

The flunky came hurrying back after a couple of minutes and gave me an order for blood work to be done for the next visit. "Did you get the Megase prescription?" I asked.

The flunky gave a really creditable imitation of the doctor's frown and excused himself. He came back five minutes later with the prescription.

He held the door open at the end of the hall as I wheeled Tim through and I asked him to call the ambulance crew to tell him we were ready to go. The cell phone number they'd given me was an 814 area code. The cancer center is in the 412 area. He frowned again. "This is long distance," he told me.

I looked at him hard before I opened my mouth, and he reconsidered and dialed the number. Good thing. I haven't seen a bill for my husband's medical care, but I'm guessing it's well up in six figures. Certainly enough to warrant a 15 second long distance call.

On the way home, the roads were terrible and traffic was worse - it took us over an hour to get out of Pittsburgh, and over two more hours to get back to the rehab.

I was getting concerned because Tim hadn't eaten since 11:30 am, and I asked the ambulance crew to check his glucose.

They couldn't find a glucometer on the ambulance. What? I made them stop for orange juice and milk and crackers just in case.

As the ambulance rolled through the near-white-out of the winter storm which left us with about three inches of snow in a couple of hours, the driver pulled out her cell phone and called home to chat a bit.

I believe my tone was fairly reasonable when I called up to her. "Please, if you're going to talk on the phone, pull over. If you're going to drive, hang up."

She said in an aggrieved tone, "Geez. SORRY."

Those of you who knew me when I was sane will understand that after the past four months I was in no mood for a cell-phone-induced ambulance accident.

Right?

Back at the rehab, I told the charge nurse that the lung doctor did not handle pee problems and to please have the rehab doctor address it. She nodded.