I’ve mentioned my frustration with my grandmother’s vascular surgeon before — the man is by all accounts a fantastic surgeon, but the interaction I have with his office often leaves me exhausted. Today was one such day.
My grandmother had angioplasty and a stent replacement a couple weeks ago. After a week in the hospital she was transferred to a nursing home for physical therapy. Everything was going well as far as I was concerned, until today when I receive a call from the surgeon’s office wanting to discharge her from the nursing home early and have nurses and physical therapists come in to help her out.
That would be a disaster. Although she’s stopped having hallucinations — a problem that always occurs for her after surgery — she is still very confused and not cognitively up to snuff. I visited her today around 12:30 p.m., for example, and she thought it was the middle of the night. And then she tells me about how she just went to a funeral and two of her brothers — both who have been dead for years — got into an argument at the funeral. The surgeon’s office just dismisses this and says once she’s in familiar surroundings that will go away. Not delusions/hallucinations that severe. They will go away eventually, but it seems to take longer and longer after surgery.
Anyway, the real reason they want her to come home is that the surgeon’s office and the nursing home cannot get along about the best way to dress her wound! The surgeon wants them to use a wet-to-dry dressing method. The nursing home simply doesn’t use wet-to-dry dressing methods, arguing that they have higher risks of bacterial cross-contamination and have been supplanted by more recent innovations in wound dressing. The surgeon, however, insists that wet-to-dry is the best solution for avoiding infection — and my grandmother has previously had problems with infections in the areas where the incisions were made for surgery.
A bigger concern for me other than the hallucinations is the physical therapy. My grandmother is well into her 80s and has had multiple such surgeries over the past four years that have really taken a toll on her. She has little incentive or motivation to do the necessary physical therapy while in the nursing therapists will be dismissed in less than a week. Bring her back home and those nurses and physical therapists will be dismissed after a few days. Stay longer while not participating fully in the therapy at the nursing home, however, and she’s racking up incredibly large nursing home bills.
It ends up being just one more thing I resent my father for abandoning any sense of responsibility and leaving my brother and I to care for her at this stage in her life (and my brother doesn’t help for reasons that I understand even if I don’t agree with).