The room is pretty well done. The ceiling fan is up. The curtains are hung. The closet is put together (with some damage to John's finger). I need to replace the wall switch for the fan and eventually get some doors for the closet. Then it will be time to find some furniture so Mom doesn't have to keep sleeping on the air mattress. I know that no matter how good an air mattress is, it gets old fairly quickly.
May 2005 Archives
Larry was accepted into a rehab at Maryland General Hospital. He was moved from Bangor to Baltimore on a Life Flight on May 26th. I went to the hospital and met him when he arrived. My Mom is driving down and will be here tomorrow. I've been trying to work, visit Larry and get a room ready for Mom. Thanks to some help from my friends, we've gotten pretty close. The room has a fresh coat of paint (it was just drywall before). I have a new ceiling fan (threw out the old one a year ago) to put up, curtains to hang and a shelf & bar to hang in the closet tomorrow.
Well, as I said in my previous post, we wrote to the Governor of Maine on Saturday May 21st about the problems we were having with Larry's medical care. We received a reply today. He contacted the Commissioner's office at the Maine Department of Health and Human Services and requested a review of the information we provided. He requested that they contact us directly with any helpful information and/or recommendations for recourse.
Of course, at this point, the hospital corrected their actions on their own. It's nice to know that there might be a little Government oversight to help out if we run into problems again though. I'd like to thank Maine Governor John Baldacci for a prompt reply to our request for help.
I have been a little out of touch lately. For those of you who don’t know, my step-father, Larry, had a massive heart attack on March 10th. He has suffered brain injury due to lack of oxygen. He was in the hospital (Eastern Maine Medical Center) for about 6 weeks. After that he was in Stillwater rehab for a little less than two weeks. Then he went home. Things were ok most of the time but he still wasn’t right. After being home for three weeks, he had an episode where he got so agitated that my mom couldn’t calm him down. She had to have him taken back to the hospital. That happened on May 15th. I received a call from my Mom saying “Come as soon as you can”. So I called my boss and got the week off. Then I packed a bag and jumped in the truck. It was 6pm when I started out and 7am the next day when I arrived. Up until that point, I thought I had a good idea of what Mom was dealing with. I didn’t.
I slept until noon on Monday. Then we headed in to the emergency room where Larry had been all night. He was being held in a closed room because he was agitated and aggressive. He had supposedly ran after some of the ER staff and, depending on which report you read, either fell down or ran into a wall. Either way, he had a black eye, 7 stitches over his right eye and his glasses were broken. None of these existed when he entered the ER. When we entered the room, it was a mess. There were dirty blankets on the floor, the pillow case had no cover and was covered in blood on both sides and there was trash (bloody wrappers from gauze bandages) on the floor. I was NOT impressed!! We bitched and the charge nurse went in and cleaned it up.
Larry was admitted to the hospital and around 5pm on Monday he was moved to the 5th floor. He was assigned a 1 on 1, which is a person who sits at the door and monitors everything he does. This room was in much better shape. All of the 1 on 1’s that I met were nice and did a good job of informing us of how he was doing each day. The Doctor was working on adjusting his medications trying to get him right. The Nurse Case Manager talked with us and said “We’ll need to try every rehab facility in New England as well as one I know of in Atlanta Georgia.” We said, Great, Go For It. Well, she sent the information to the one in Georgia. Other than that, the only places she has tried are the ones we’ve told her about. We were on the phone continuously when we weren’t at the hospital. We’ve had so many facilities say no. It’s quite disheartening. Many are even saying he’s too healthy because he doesn’t need any physical rehab.
On Friday, the Nurse Practitioner told us they intended to discharge Larry on Monday because there was “No Medical Need” to keep him there. She said if we hadn’t found a rehab facility to take him to and we weren’t willing to take him home that Mom would be responsible to 100% of the bill (Medicare would stop paying). We were flabbergasted. How could they say there was No Medical Need when his meds obviously were not correct and he had just gotten so aggressive that they had to restrain him? Heck, the 1 on 1 just took a bottle of lotion away from him because he “wanted to get the skin on the inside” and was going to drink it. What the hell were these people thinking????
On Saturday morning, we let the Nurse Case Manager on duty (weekend, not the normal nurse) know that we had contacted the Governors office and a Congresswoman’s office and that this was NOT a SAFE DISCHARGE. We also let it slip that we intended to contact the press. Amazingly, on Saturday afternoon the Doctor called to say he had seen Larry and decided he could not be discharged. I can’t say for sure that he knew what we told the Nurse Case Manager, but I’d be willing to bet he did. Either way, we won a reprieve.
Saturday night I left Maine. I went to NH and crashed at my Sisters house for the night and then left first thing Sunday morning for Maryland. I arrived home around 5:30pm.
I have learned A LOT from this incident. Most importantly, I’ve learned about the importance of a Health Care Power of Attorney and a financial POA also. I guess it’s time I find a lawyer and get a will, a living will, a Health Care POA and a financial POA.
There is SO much more to this story, but I’m out of energy to write it. Our search for a rehab facility continues. They continue to either say no or they say they don’t have any beds. My Moms nightmare continues. She is on her way to the hospital right now…
Heather and I went to see the movie CRASH last night. I thought it was very good. They did a great job of interweaving all the characters together. The movie really showed just how screwed up this world can be.
I have the official word on the Gelstat Sinus release date. It appears that they put it off a little in favor of getting Gelstat Arthritis onto the market. Gelstat Sinus is now expected to be available through their online store in the third quarter.
I had a migraine last night. It's the first one I've had in a few months. I'm happy to have gone so long without one. I'm also happy I had some Gelstat Migraine on hand. This time, I can definitely say that Gelstat kicked my migraines ass. The bad side is that the sublingual application method feels a little odd and it doesn't taste all that great. The good side is that my migraine was subdued in less than 15 minutes and completely gone in about 30. I'll take two applications of 60 seconds each over a migraine any day.
About.com did a product review of Gelstat Migraine and gave it 5 stars. There are also several articles on the web from doctors who are starting to use it as another treatment. Have you tried it? I'd LOVE to hear from anyone else who has tried it. You can leave a comment here or email me at blog@mjonesweb.com.
While I'm on the subject, I received a sample of the prototype for Gelstat Sinus back in January. I have used it and I found it to be about as effective as Nasonex. I'll see if I can get an update on its release date.
I got my truck back from the body shop on Monday. The keying damage has been repaired. Overall, I'm very happy with the work. Tristate Collision did a really good job on the paint. You can't even tell the damage was there. I haven't found any runs or color discrepancies. While their work was great, their customer interaction skills could use a little work. The truck was done on Friday but when I called on Monday they couldn't find any paperwork in the front office so they decided it must still be being worked on. I called my insurance agent who said his notes said it was done. So he called them and about 20 minutes later called me back to say it was done. I went in and picked up the truck. On Tuesday, a friend noticed that a piece of plastic molding was gone. So after work I went back to the shop. They looked into it and said "When we put that piece back on a clip was bent and it wouldn't go on tight. We had ordered a new piece but it was on back order. It's in now and we replace it. It will take 10 minutes.". Well, I find it odd that they didn't mention that when I picked up my truck. If it hadn't disappeared and I hadn't come back, would they have called me to come back in and replace that part??? I doubt it. Anyway, I gave them the truck for "10 minutes". 40 minutes later I was still waiting. I finally went to find out what was going on. It turned out that they forgot to put a new FX4 decal on when they were done painting and they were waiting to get that put on. It would be "another 5 minutes". That 5 turned into 20 before it was done. Had they just come to me and said they found something else and it would be a bit longer I would have been fine. The fact that they left me hanging without telling me what was going on had me a bit annoyed. Well, that and the fact that they had crappy reading material in the waiting room. :)
So, if you want good paint work and can put up with a little lack of interpersonal skills, feel free to go to Tristate Collision in Columbia MD.
I'm also quite happy with the way my insurance company (Progressive) handled things. There were very good, especially since I waited three weeks before calling them. I'll have to wait a few months before I can tell you if they raise my rates for making a claim or not though.
The image below is from the FRONT PAGE of the April 22, 2005 (Volume 27 Number 16) of The Processor. The Processor is a paper for IT professionals.
I'm wondering how much trouble the editor got into for leaving out the "L" in public! This just goes to show that you can't rely on spell check for everything! Luckily, they have fixed it in their online version.
