21 August 2020
I didn't talk to Joyce today until this afternoon. I had to run over to her bank to deposit two $10 checks from Kaiser for overpayments (imagine) and then over to Kaiser to drop off Whitney's1 letter (which she just loved).
She won't be released next week, so it's still better to send mail to her at the hospital. Here again is the address:
Kaiser Permanente Hospital
ATTN: Joyce Abbott
2425 Geary Blvd., Room 4353
San Francisco, CA 94115-3358You can watch the little note in the left margin of the headlines page to see when she gets a release date, however vague. But as Dr. Tong said yesterday, it's going to be a long haul.
Here, for example, is a side note. I mention phone orientation because you wouldn't see the contact information in the left margin holding the phone in portrait orientation.
Which reminds me to point out that these stories look a little different if you're holding your phone in portrait mode. Try landscape mode to see things like that note in the left margin or side notes in the right margin.
On a narrow screen, they take up too much space, so they're hidden. But on a wide screen, you see what you'd seen on a computer monitor.2
Back to Joyce. She's still a little loopy from the anesthesia. But after you chat with her a while, she sounds better than when she was dealing with the constant infections.
Which is good news.
She told me she's still having trouble swallowing all the pills. They've cut them in half and even pulverized them and mixed them in applesauce for her.
Maybe if they dissolved them in bourbon they'd go down easier.
But she's almost done with the two antibiotics anyway.
She wondered how to get in touch with Dr. Tong. She has an app to contact any of her doctors but she finds it too hard to use or hard to get a connection. I suspect she is trying to use her data connection instead of the guest WiFi but she hasn't been able to figure out how to connect. I tell her to ask a nurse.
Nurses know everything.
I also asked her to have Dr. Cook call me to give me her perspective on Joyce's progress. That confused her a little. Dr. Cook is going off the rotation next week anyway and she apparently doesn't see Joyce every day either.
So I'll just keep giving Joyce these little tasks to do to see for myself what kind of progress she's making!
And I'll let you know what happens.