My mother spent about a week in the hospital. They sent her to Rust on the westside. It’s a ways out there, but we’ve always had very good care there. Of course, because of the pandemic, no one was able to visit her. They stabilized her with oxygen – she didn’t like it, but she was at least conscious. Consciousness, however, brought it’s own problems. Mom got very agitated. She didn’t want to wear the oxygen. She wanted any of us to visit her. She couldn’t understand why she was still there. I guess I couldn’t either, but I figured they knew what they were doing.<\/p>\n
Now, remember this was in the beginning of the coronavirus in the US. And in NM, everything was an unknown. We didn’t know much about what the virus was. We certainly didn’t have any kind of treatment figured out yet. In fact at the time my mom went into the hospital, New Mexico was still only reporting “presumptive” cases. We were hunkered down at home and I was thankful my mom was somewhere she should get care.<\/p>\n
After a week, the hospital decided to let her go. “Does she have someplace to go?” they asked. Of course she does. She has her apartment. Even though they were sending her home with supplemental oxygen, I didn’t think it would be a big deal. Aaron and the crew at Camino dealt with folks and their oxygen all the time. So, I went to the hospital to pick her up. When I got there, I was escorted up to the nurses’ station and given what seemed like hazmat covering to go into her room. They were just keeping us all safe, but that was miserable. I have a tremendous appreciation for the entire healthcare community and what they’ve had to go through.<\/p>\n
The nurse helped me get mom into her wheelchair. She seemed ok, but weak. But as long as she could stand I could “manhandle” her into the car.<\/p>\n
That was a mistake. Dead weight is dead weight. She slipped out of my grasp in the middle of the parking lot. It was scary; it was frustrating; it was maddening. Luckily there were some very helpful off-work hospital staff walking through the parking lot who helped me get her into the car. I’m not at all sure about what happened next. My mom was angry, that’s for sure. But she was also agitated, didn’t seem to really grasp what was going on. She was not the mother I dropped off a week before.<\/p>\n
I took her home – I’m not at all sure how I got her to her apartment. And when I got there, I didn’t stay, of course. But we soon heard from the staff at Camino. Apparently, mom needed more care than they could provide at the apartment. I remember feeling like things were crashing down around me: why had they sent her home so weak? They had said she was fine to go home. If she couldn’t stay at her apartment, where was she going to go? I couldn’t take care of her – I couldn’t even get her in the car!<\/p>\n
Well, I was able to complain to Presbyterian Hospital enough about the conditions in which they released her that they ordered 21 days of rehab.<\/p>\n
TO BE CONTINUED…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My mother spent about a week in the hospital. They sent her to Rust on the westside. It’s a ways out there, but we’ve always had very good care there. Of course, because of the pandemic, no one was able to visit her. They stabilized her with oxygen – she didn’t like it, but she […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":409,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-covid-experience"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ambiguouslyblonde.com\/files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ambiguouslyblonde.com\/files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ambiguouslyblonde.com\/files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ambiguouslyblonde.com\/files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ambiguouslyblonde.com\/files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=407"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ambiguouslyblonde.com\/files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":408,"href":"https:\/\/ambiguouslyblonde.com\/files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407\/revisions\/408"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ambiguouslyblonde.com\/files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ambiguouslyblonde.com\/files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ambiguouslyblonde.com\/files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ambiguouslyblonde.com\/files\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}