Almost Home

This week I managed to accomplish a slideboard transfer "Min 1," an upgrade from "Mod 2" that I used to be rated.  Upgraded because I did it in front of therapists, where it counts, as opposed to in front of nursing aides last week who can't report on it.  What does all this mean?  Instead of needing two people to moderately help me by actually helping to scoot my hips for me, I can now slide from the bed to the wheelchair or back again with one person to help get the slideboard in place and then sit back and watch me scoot without hardly having to touch me at all.  This is a huge improvement not just in my independence but also on the scoring methods used by insurance to justify and/or quantify my progress and reasons for staying here.  

Speaking of insurance, it looks like they have accepted the therapists' recommendations to allow me two more weeks from the beginning of this week, setting my tentative discharge date as March 30th instead of the previously anticipated 27th.  I am excited and challenged, as there is still a lot of work physically left to do to meet my discharge goals in terms of function, but I desperately want to make that date work because I'm so ready to finally go home.  Ready, and finally feeling like I'm starting to make the kind of progress necessary to keep me safe there, and make it manageable for me and just one other strong person i.e. my husband or his dad to care for me.

In the meantime, I've got to continue advocating for my own care and comfort as well.  

Issue number one:  room temperature.  I've been trying for days to get switched places with my roommate, who is on the side of the room next to the air conditioner (and the windows) and is always cold.  I am on the side farthest from the a/c and always warm.  She can hardly tolerate even my little floor fan circulating the air in the room much less allow having the a/c turned on, and I am sweating all night long and not sleeping well.  It took two days of strong pushing and reminding of nurses to get them to seriously investigate whether we could be switched, and by that time, my once apparently willing roommate had changed her mind.  She's going home in six more days and doesn't think it's worth the hassle, but I'm not willing to spend another six days feeling hot and clammy, so once it was made clear to me that the move was being delayed (read: cancelled) because she wasn't willing to do it (this took half a day to inform me about after I kept pressing), I started pushing for a room transfer instead.  My nurse told me there was a woman being discharged today who was next to the a/c in her room, and perhaps I could be transferred in there.  Yet again, nothing ever came of it, and I will have to cross my fingers and push hard in the morning to try to get moved in there before a newly admitted patient snags the spot.

Issue number two:  diet.  This morning when my breakfast arrived it had mysteriously been converted from the regular diet selections I made on the regular menu yesterday to a rough translation of those requests on the carb-controlled diabetic diet, today's menu for said restricted diet accompanying my meal.  This seemed outrageously unfair to me, to be summarily downgraded in dietary choices despite the fact that my blood sugars while eating from the normal menu have been not only excellent but frequently almost too low, and further restricting my carb intake would surely make them even lower, even more often.  I first protested to the internal medicine doctor who visits me early in the morning, and he seemed to be in basic agreement that it was an unnecessary change but didn't really act like there was anything he could do about it.  He made it sound like the staff dietician had made the choice.  So I decided to talk to her next, and asked her if she had even seen my blood sugars, and she hadn't.  She agreed to look them over, but also indicated that she's not in control of which diet I'm assigned to, because the doctors do that, so she also said she'd talk to the doctor to see what options we might have for getting me back on the regular diet.  Seemed like a lot of shifty finger pointing to me, but by the time she checked my chart to see my awesome sugar levels, there was already a notation that the doctors had ordered me back onto the normal diet.  I thanked her for following up on it and was happy with the end result, but I still wonder who made the change in the first place.  I suspect it might have been the doctor I spoke with first, who backpaddled away from his decision as soon as he heard me protesting and citing my low sugars as cause for concern about further lowering my carbs.  It wouldn't really surprise me if he'd suddenly noticed they forgot to put me on the diabetic diet originally, and thought he'd just quietly correct it, without even consulting my chart or me to see how my sugars had been doing.  Oh well, at least it will be fixed tomorrow.