Th’ Luvly Laura – Christmas at Home?

I promised my Luvly Laura she would wake in her own home for Christmas, and she will, dammit!

I had hoped to bring her home Monday the 19^th, and keep her here thru New Year’s Eve.  That’s not gonna work.  She’s too fragile for all that, and as you can see below, she needs actual nursing care. But everyone at the nursing home needs to understand that I’m probably as competent as a caregiver as anyone who has someone living there, and far better than most.  And I can afford experienced help for a short period.  So today I shall put a stop to the nonsense.  I’ll scale back, and bring her home for a half-day Monday.  That will help me figure out what I need for a two or three day stay.

I’m hoping to bring her home Friday the 23^rd (our 44^th anniversary), and keep her here until late Christmas Day, a two-night stay.  If that goes well, perhaps she can come home again the next weekend for New Years.  If not – party at the nursing home.

But the home is fighting me about even that.  They don’t want her out overnight.  Well, she’s not gonna die in minutes, so if her health goes south, I’ll get her to a hospital.  We have a perfectly good ambulance service in Shelby Twp., and I’m not afraid to use ‘em.

Th’ Luvly Laura WILL wake up at home Christmas morning, by damn, ‘cause I promised… or I’ll know the reason why.

For folks new to the saga, Th’ Luvly Laura has spent the last nine months pretty much in hospitals and nursing homes.  Physical and Occupational therapy have been abandoned by our insurance as non-productive, and she is pretty much wholly bed-ridden.  She presently resides at: Cambridge North, 535 N. Main, Clawson, MI 48017, and for those of you who can, she loves letters, cards and visits.

She also keeps losing hemoglobin (she becomes severely anemic and requires transfusions every few weeks) and suffers from recurring bladder and intestinal infections.  Last month, she went into the hospital for an overnight to get a double transfusion, and wound up blowing up both infections and extending her stay to nearly two weeks.  She came back to a new room.  We discovered that all her clothing had been taken (new clothing with the tags still on), and that a roomie was a ‘borrower’ who wore whatever she liked in the closet… and then took it off in some other room and left it – another pair of jeans and brand new shirt gone.  Laura was very upset until we found a different room with a window and a roommate who keeps to herself.

She is fed through a stomach tube because her swallowing skills are declining. She does get a ‘pleasure tray’ at every meal (something to provide the pleasure of eating), but eats very little of it.  I can’t take a feeding pump home, so I’ll have to provide a ‘bolus’ feeding every hour or so (by filling a 20 cc syringe and pushing it into the tube in her stomach).  This also means that she has great difficulty forming words and ‘projecting’ them audibly… a most frustrating situation for her.