Done Since 2021-05-02

It has not been a good week.

It started out okay; the plan was for Colleen to come home from rehab on Wednesday or Thursday -- there was a care conference scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. I moved my base of operations back up to Whidbey. Several missing items turned up in unexpected places. (Sunday I found my clipboard, which had the tax information I hadn't entered yet: it proved to be underneath Colleen's, in the top drawer of her nightstand. Wednesday I found Colleen's passport card, which had been missing for months, in my backpack -- it had apparently fallen out of or off of her wallet or a clipboard at some point.)

Tuesday at the care conference we decided to discharge Colleen on Wednesday, and I started taking things home. But, also on Tuesday, her health started to go downhill: low Potassium, high white cell count and creatinine... By Wednesday her lab results were still bad if not worse, and an RN from Prestige called in the morning to say that they wanted to keep her "another couple of days". [I'll put details in the next "State of the FlowerCat" post.] Thursday her discharge date was moved to Friday, but she wasn't actually getting better.

Friday at another care conference it became obvious that her condition was bad enough that she ought to be transferred to a hospital, and she went down to UW's main hospital in a cabulance. Prestige (the rehab place) covered the cost, which was unexpected. There wasn't any point in going down to UW, since we knew that visitors weren't permitted in the ER, so I spent the rest of the afternoon down at N's.

Yesterday morning Colleen called from the hospital to tell me that no visitors were permitted in the room, either, and to tell me what they'd found so far, including indications that at least some of her problems were caused by things that happened at Prestige. [There will be a more detailed rant in the State of the FlowerCat post.] I finished doing my taxes (which is worth a whole nother rant -- maybe later). I drove down and dropped off her Mother's Day present from E, a Cheshire Cat plushy from Build-a-Bear.

I got an update from her nurse 5ish; fortunately I was on the ferry to Whidbey at the time. I called Colleen and she seemed impressed with the care she was getting, compared with Swedish and especially compared with Prestige. She will not be going back to Prestige, and I will not be using H&R Block's website for my taxes. Probably not the desktop app, either.

When I called this morning she was pretty miserable, between wanting to be home for Mother's Day, and an IV in the back of her left (dominant) hand.

There are medical details in the notes, so you may want to skip them this week.

( Notes & links, as usual )

River: Mother's Day 2021

Today is Mother's Day, and it's the first without my usual call to Mom.

...and Colleen has been in hospitals (three so far) and rehab for the last forty days. I've had better Mother's Days.