Yeah, when I had my sinus surgery that's how the surgeon talked about scenarios. "X patients of mine out of Y blah..."
Well today was pretty bad. 15 minutes after dropping her meds off at the treatment center we took her to yesterday, they called me and said "she is so completely infirm we can't help her, she needs too much care."
Since she's been in detox she has gone from shaky to basically crippled. She fell last night trying to get to the bathroom and grazed her head right near her eye. On a lamp she said. A very close call. My understanding is two guys were trying to help her even.
The nurse there told me "She needs physical therapy. Her body is absolutely wrecked." It's crazy to me because just three weeks ago she was with me and seemed, more or less, normal. The people at the treatment center told me to take her BACK to the first hospital I took her to, to the ER, because they thought she was that bad off after a night with her. (I'm guessing it's also true they didn't want to take the liability for her either.)
So for the second time in two days I took my mom to the ER. And this time I told the staff I was not fucking around. I told them I brought her in on Sunday and the staff had more or less written us off. They did labs, gave her a few pills and told her to hit a treatment facility. The lady on staff who pointed us to the treatment facility in the first place essentially walked in, handed us a printed out sheet with a couple notes and said something to the effect of "we can't officially endorse any of these places and that's all I can really tell you." She was very nice and sympathetic to mom, but essentially useless. I could have gotten that shit off of Google.
The people at the hospital had no idea that, as soon as she really started detoxing, she would fall completely apart. Like I said, she can't even hardly walk by herself right now, only by leaning into a wall and banging into everything along the way. The fact they sent her off on Sunday......infuriating. She basically has like no muscle mass left at all so she's just jelly and shaking like a leaf to boot. She's sick in every goddamn sense of the word and they wanted to tell us to get lost.
So when we went back I raised a little hell. Told the doctor point blank that if the refused to admit her for detox, monitoring, recovery, hydration, nutrients, vitamins, drugs and everything else she desperately needs they would fucking hear about it in more ways than one. He calmly told me it wasn't his decision to make, it was the hospital administrator's. And I told him that if they refused us, I wanted their name. Because I already had his.
Amazing what putting your foot down will do. Within the next three hours I had not one but two doctors come in and deal with her, she was on a nutrient-rich IV drip within 10 minutes and about six nurses came through to do this, that and the other thing. Doctor #1 realized that after seeing all her bruises and hearing that she'd at some point hit her head in the last few weeks (news to me of course) that she should have a CAT scan. (Which we never heard the results of. I'm not sure if that's good or bad.) After the second doctor came in and said they would admit her (and actually took detailed notes, something Sunday's ER doctor did not) we got her into a real hospital room out of the ER and started getting her some help.
The stupidest thing is this: this hospital has an in-house treatment center especially FOR detoxing. It's the place everyone in the city says to go to...but it only has three beds. Three beds for an entire county. And there's a waiting list. They want to refuse to detox people and send them off to some other clinic in town, and have them come to their place for recovery after they detox. Three beds....and this damn place costs $200 A DAY, and that's with Medicare covering the other costs. I had the people at the treatment center I'd taken her to earlier tell me to fight the hospital if they tried to refuse to admit her to the normal hospital for detox, that they could absolutely medically detox my mother if they needed to, that simply putting her in a bed and feeding her some pills and regular food wasn't going to cut it. And then I had nurses at the hospital telling me the people at the treatment center often overreact in their recommendations. Shit, we're a middle class family with good educations all around and enough money, and finding actual, legit treatment for this has been fucked. What is a poor person with little to no education supposed to do if they find themselves in real trouble? Hope someone gives a shit enough about their plight to take them seriously?
It's practically fucking negligence that they were going to send her away. No treatment center would handle her in her condition, she needed real medical attention, and the hospital wanted to pass her off because she "couldn't take a detox bed in our state of the art treatment center" attached to the goddamn hospital.
Fuck that though, my mom is literally falling apart in front of my eyes as she starts to detox and I was not going to take no for answer.
Trouble didn't really end there though. I left to get her a care package, and when I got back probably 2 hours later with the rest of the family, we found the door to her room open and the curtain drawn. I kind of immediately sensed something had been going on. Apparently she tried earlier to get up without help to go pee. Tore out her IV part way. Fell. The nurse in her wing barely caught her before she hit the floor, she only knew she was moving because she'd heard her banging around and went into the room to check on her. They've now set up her bed with a really loud alarm if she tries to get up and they're leaving the door open so they can hear what she's doing. *sigh* Of all the times my mother decides to get tough, it's when she's completely incapable of doing whatever it is she's doing successfully. The minute I walked into the room she went "Oh good, you can help me get up to pee" and tried to (unsuccessfully) roll herself out of bed her IV in her, again. We started to help but them decided "yeah, let's not try to do this ourselves" called the nurses in and it took two of them to help her into the bathroom. It was only then that I noticed the bruise forming on her eye and the cut on her head and I'd spent all day with her stroking her head and wiping away tears. The nurse who has been dealing with her since full admittance to the hospital also said she did not see it at first. Since it happened yesterday if there's a problem the CAT scan would have probably caught it but.....still haven't heard what those results were.
She kept saying "I don't want to bother anyone...." when we asked why she KEEPS trying to get up by herself even though she knows she can't make it...and I know that's her pride talking. Having people needing to help you pee in a bathroom is humiliating. She feels shamed and embarrassed enough as it is without that indignity. But she is too damn stubborn to take all the help she needs, she's gotta hold on to that one thing she's going to try to do herself. I mean, on the one hand I'm heartened by her desire to fight for something as simple but vital as getting herself to the toilet. I'd prefer that to despondency and catatonia. But she's hurting herself more every time she tries to do it. Part of me is afraid if it's self-destructive behavior. She's been asked like 8 times now if she's even thought about suicide and said no but.....
I told the nurse straight up "restrain her if it comes to that." And then I told her I told them that. It's shit that I have to be that guy, but I can't risk her falling and bashing her head open. The very thought is terrifying because it's such a real possibility between her infirmity, her disorientation and her twisted sense of pride. Apparently she's having mild hallucinations as well, which I'm told is not uncommon for detox patients.
Anyways, the plan is for her to now detox at the hospital in 24/7 managed care, which she should have had already. The Intervention Nurse comes in tomorrow to do her drug and alcohol evaluation, which is her first step to being admitted to "the best treatment and recovery center in town." I've been told her treatment can last anywhere from 30 to 45 days. So I'm probably going to need to move into her house part time to take care of it and the animals. (At least it will be about 10x more pleasant to live in than it has been after we've been cleaning it.) She's also going to need to add physical therapy to the list of things she needs to do, because even once she's fully detoxed her body is totally wasted away and she needs to build her muscles back up. Without that, she can't even begin to live on her own.
...there's a good chance she may be in treatment or some form of monitored care for months. Depending on how she recovers, how quickly she comes back from this, I may have to move home again just to care for her.
I mean fuck me....I saw her three weeks ago! She was walking fine! Maybe I've just become so inured to her decline that I didn't see the signs that were right in front of me. I just can't square the woman lying in the bed now to the one of just three weeks ago. I want to say I hope tomorrow is better but in truth, it's probably going to be even worse. The more she detoxes the worse and, honestly, crazier she's going to get until she is through it. And that could take weeks before that happens completely. I can see why the hospital was unwilling to take detox patients into general treatment. The process is not pretty and my mom is basically using up three nurses' attention just to keep her safe from herself. And this is just Day 2. But you know what? Fuck the system, she needs real help. The more I think on it, the more I realize how close she came to dying in more than one way. Inconveniencing the hospital is the least of my concerns compared to that.