As I awoke yesterday morning, I went through my normal morning routines on my laptop only to discover a three day heavy snow warning that will cover most of the UK from Saturday until Monday. Although I have not been looking forward to the arrival of snow, at least with sufficient warning, I may well be able to make sure that I have sufficient supplies in the house foodwise and plan whether a journey out of the house with Meg in a wheelchair is feasible or foolhardy. I suspect the answer is the latter but we will have to see what eventually falls out of the sky and how much it settles. A major activity is to get the doctor contacted and hope (pray?) for a home visit so that Meg's condition can be properly medically assessed. After treating myself non-stop with Cold and Relief powders, I think that my heavy cold/flu is starting to battled back but in the evening, I gave a whole packet of these powders to my young Asian male carer (who calls nearly every day) as he was starting to suffer and I need to keep him on his feet so that he can continue to care for us. This raises the interesting question of not only 'Who cares for the carers?' but now 'Who cares for the carers of the carers'? Today has turned out not as I expected. As soon as our GP's website opened at 7.30am this morning, I filled in a form requesting an urgent visit by a doctor to assess Meg's condition but I happened to mention at the start of the message that one of yesterday's care workers had found Meg 'unresponsive' and thought I ought to call either 111 or 999. This word proved to be my undoing, unwittingly, because the person called a 'Healthcare Navigator' read the word 'unresponsive' and suggested that I immediately call an ambulance. To some healthcare professionals, and perhaps to all, unresponsive equates to unconscious and then all kinds of new protocols swing into play. I tried to get a little breakfast into Meg and got phoned up by a very sympathetic nurse from the group that specialises in Meg's condition and I explained some of the dilemmas I was having in treating Meg appropriately. I needed to curtail the conversation, though as Meg was left in the care of one of our trusty sitters whilst I went off to do the first proper shopping I have done for two weeks. When I got back, though, I was dismayed to see the message from the surgery suggestion I call an ambulance which was the last place Meg needed to be. The midday sitter came along and helped me to give Meg some soup which I think revived her and gave me some emotional support and comfort as well. I was not in the mood for lunch so had a couple of mince pies enhanced by a hunk of cheese and then fortunately I got another telephone call from the nurse with whom I had spoken in the morning. She was absolutely brilliant but took some of Meg's symptoms and then negotiated a visit from a doctor which happened mid afternoon. It is a sad fact of life that sometimes the GP's surgeries respond more to a request from fellow professionals than they do to us, the immediate carers of their patients. But the nurse had said all the right things, persuaded the surgery that going to hospital was not appropriate and got a doctor's visit scheduled for us. The doctor discovered some rumblings in Meg's chest indicating perhaps a deep seated chest infection and was going to prescribe some penicillin for her. But her blood pressure and oxygen levels and temperature seemed OK so perhaps the infection that Meg has is not rampaging as it were but is has knocked her sideways for two or three days. The doctor and I spent some time completing the Respect (and DNR) forms so that we are decided that Meg does not want to get carted off to hospital unnecessarily but would prefer any treatment regime to be at home. The doctor reinforced the point which I already knew that often what kills dementia patients is not the dementia itself but an infection which the body's natural defences cannot cope with and so the patient gets overwhelmed by, and killed by, the infection. In the case of a fracture, for example, a hospital visit would still be indicated but otherwise the ambulance staff would act in accordance with the wishes on the Respect form. I am afraid this made the frailty of Meg and her prospects for the rest of her life come very sharply into relief for me and I must admit to some very emotional moments when I thought things through. But when the carers arrived for Meg' afternoon call, I talked them through things and they were incredibly sympathetic and supportive, even promising to come out at other times in the day if here was something that they could do to help.
In the late morning, though, I got some much better news from Yorkshire where my niece's husband had been taken into hospital with a suspected second stroke. But two specialist consultants have concluded that it was probably another neurological condition rather than a stroke although the symptoms can appear very similar. Sp my niece's husband is now back at home and my niece is feeling pretty relieved. If it had been a second stroke then it would have impacted on her life considerably trying to carry on teaching and caring for a disabled husband at the same time. So I expressed my delight that the news was not anything like as bad as first we feared and we all live to fight another day. At least my sister after her two bouts in hospital is in a residential home and the move into this seems providential and was put into effect just when needed.
© Mike Hart [2024]