Caveat: Whose hand is that?

It’s Wednesday morning, 5:30 AM, downhill from the wallaby encampment in Far North Queensland. Yesterday was, again, less productive than I’d hoped.

Bureaucratic gears turn slowly. I did get one application submitted to a care facility down in Cairns that didn’t outright reject my interest with “we are full.”

Several people, trying to help, have insisted on trying to pursue some kind of in-home care option instead of a care facility. First and foremost, it’s not clear that the hospital would even allow my mom to be discharged to her home, even with a live-in assistant. They consider her disabilities to be too great, at this point. Something about “level 4” on whatever scale they use. But even allowing they might, finding someone who’d be willing to be a live-in carer at my mom’s house runs into numerous obstacles, including: the remoteness of her house (more than one hour from Atherton, the nearest town with a stoplight or doctor); the obstreperousness of her personality (at what price would a stranger be willing to put up with that?).

Anyway… time with her yesterday underscored the extent to which her dementia is real and quite disabling at this point. She’d insist she needed to use the toilet, ring the nurse call button, and unless I intervened, she’d tell the nurse, when they came, that she was fine and didn’t need to go to the toilet – only to once again insist she needed to go the moment the nurse departed the room. Later, a doctor came in and asked if she’d succeeded in using the toilet yet, and Ann would assert that she hadn’t – after having just returned from the toilet 15 minutes before. In eerie ways, it’s not that different than dealing with Arthur, but made much harder to cope with by her greater helplessness.

In good (?) news, a CT scan of her brain failed to find evidence for a stroke. I’m actually a bit bewildered by this – so many of her current symptoms feel “stroke-like” to me – the quite severe expressive aphasia, the weird half-paralyzed aspect of her left (only left) arm and hand, the drooping eyelid. At one moment yesterday, she was studying her left hand, as it lay curled and seemingly unresponsive on the little table-cart thing in front of her, where her lunch had just been removed. “That’s not mine,” she declared. “What?” I asked. She reached over awkwardly with her right hand (in the sling, because of the broken shoulder), and pointed. “Your hand?” I asked. She nodded. Something is going on. It could just be severe but “normal” brain atrophy, as the young on-call doctor termed it.

In other, better, news, she walked (!) across the hospital room – first time since check-in at the hospital. A physical therapist worked with her for about 30 minutes – simple things: moving her feet, stand up, sit down. And announced that she didn’t see any problem with Ann trying to use the walker. Cussing (and then apologizing) through the whole trip, Ann made it across the room to her bed with a walker, and me running “backup” behind with a wheelchair in case she might give up and want to sit down.

For some readers who might be curious, Arthur, meanwhile, seems to be doing fine, under a regime frequent check-ins and food offerings by our wonderful neighbors – Kim, Brandt, Penny, Greg and Sue. Kim remarks that he “sleeps a lot” – but this is not a new development. His days (and nights) seem to be a kind of never-ending cycle of “sleep-restlessness-rest-sleep”. I’m glad he’s doing okay. He might resent me when I’m back, I probably nag him too much (which is to say, at all).

Today I’d thought I’d be heading down to Cairns to have a look at (tour) of one or two care facilities, but none have offered appointments, and the discharge nurse (Peter) advised that drop-bys weren’t likely to be successful. I’ll try to get off some more applications today.

A daily wallaby picture.

picture

I saw storm clouds and heard lots of thunder. Here, looking northeastish from the hospital parking lot. It was 36 C (97 F) and 100% humidity. It is height of summer, here.

picture


CaveatDumpTruck Logo

Back to Top