So irritated!

I’m so ticked right now. Ron’s better today but in a pissy mood and I don’t blame him. His foot bandage came loose yesterday so we had one of the nurses look at it. He said the wound care team didn’t work weekends but there was an order on the chart for them to come this morning. When I left at 9:30 they had not been there. The bandage the nurse put on also came loose and he was oozing on the bed. He pushed the call light (he’s right outside the nurse’s station) and after about 10 minutes I opened the door and said something to the clerk. They had been laughing and chit-chatting the whole time and I was getting irritated. She said someone should be floating around but I thought someone should have at least acknowledged his light. His nurse right now is a non-English as 1st language nun and although she’s very nice she doesn’t communicate adequately.

About the time the nurse got there so did the PA from the infection doc’s office. She looked at it and said the seal on the sponge is good but the rest of the bandage is what was loose and because his new skin is so thin there that is what was oozing. She put a bandage on to keep the integrity of the wound intact until the wound team could come.

Also, I had asked for a clean gown for him when I got there and noticed that one of his telemetry leads was actually stuck to his gown and not his body. It was off all night (I guess someone told him that) but the overnight people did not even come in to see what was going on. I told someone this morning that it was off and it took about 30 minutes for someone to come and put new patches on.

On my way to work I stopped in the gift store and bought Ron a little flower pot that looks like a VW van hippie-style from the 60’s with flowers in it. It was really cute. I wrote him a little card that said “Chin up lover boy; we will overcome this, too. We may not have it all together but together we have it all.”

Before I even got to work Ron was calling me all upset because they’re not checking his sugars like they should and he’s not had one dose of insulin although I told the admitting nurse that he took Lantus twice a day and I know she wrote it down. The weekend crew took his sugars several times a day and the highest he had was 194 last night. This morning it was 145 fasting and it’s only because I’m choosing a low carb diet for him. I assumed they would give him insulin last night after I left but he said they did not. The nun said there are no orders on the chart for insulin. The on-call doctor probably forgot to say “insulin” when he was approving all the meds and then no one has thought to say “oh this man is diabetic maybe we should check on his insulin requirements.” Maybe they assume he’s diet controlled (which his diet control is good right now but that's not always the case).

So he pushed his call light again and could hear them laughing and having a good time at the nurse’s station. I don’t know how long it was before the sister came back in. She was going to call Dr. Alvarado’s office to see if she can get it straightened out and Ron also called them. I tried to call the director of that nursing unit but haven’t been able to yet. I was just being directed to the wrong person and since I was on the phone doing personal stuff during business, I opted to wait a bit before I called back. I was going to take a break and call but Ron called me back and was very upset at the treatment he was receiving and asked me to come back to the hospital.

When I got back to the hospital I called the supervisor over that nursing station, explained who I was and what I wanted, and then asked her to come down to Ron's room. Once she was there we explained everything that had gone on from our perspective and she did some investigating. She came back with Ron's chart and showed me where the admitting doctor (who doesn't know Ron) discontinued his insulin, so when the nurse called and talked to the other doctor (who doesn't know him either), he just said go with what the admitting doctor ordered. But, someone should have and could have communicated this to us and we would have called the doctor's office ourselves to get it straightened out, or we would have talked to the doctor when he made rounds that morning to explain the need for insulin. (After it was all said and done, the director brought him in a plant in the same type of container that I'd already bought him flowers in.)

I had about 4 hours of sleep Saturday night and even less last night. I’m worn out, stressed, and my nerves are at the surface of my skin.

The cardiologist was in and said he wanted to look at the thallium stress test from last Wednesday and the echo from the week before. Ron may need a heart cath but he doesn’t think he needs a pacemaker right now. He’s going to give him Lasix IV every hour to try and get some more fluid off and he needs to have another chest x-ray. He has lost 7 pounds since Saturday night and 47 since Easter. He weighed 262 this morning but he has absolutely no muscle left.