4 November 2024
Mundstock gave me a lift to Golden Heights yesterday to see Joyce. I brought along a box of Mepilex bandages and an extension cord.
She couldn't plug her compact charger into the wall because the outlet is recessed (poorly installed, in short). The extension cord can get into the outlet, so that takes care of that. She can charge her phone.
I looked at her wound dressing and saw they had tried to cover it with gauze bandages. That's different from what I saw yesterday so I assumed someone had changed the dressing.
But Zezzy the RN said she'd change it now.
It's very hard to communicate with the staff for whom English is a second language.
It was clear, though, that Zezzy had no idea what she was doing. Even when I told her how the dressing is built up and she had looked up the order, it remained puzzling.
But she was good natured about it and showed my the Vashe bottle, so I was assured she wasn't using saline solution (even if she greatly underestimated how much she needed), and the amount of Santyl she would apply (which wasn't nearly enough).
She did find once she got to work, asking me to check each stage and thanking me for my help.
I'm not counting but I must have supervised about a dozen dressing changes between Kaiser and the SNF. It's always a new person who has no idea what to do.
Whenever I ask Joyce if her dressing has been changed, she says it has. So I can't rely on her either. And of course, she's never seen a dressing change, so she can't help them.
I did find the rehab gym. It's just across the hall from Joyce's room.
When I got home from dinner at a nice restaurant in Millbrae that the Mundstocks hosted for some friends, the SNF called to get "verbal consent" to give Joyce an antidepressant I wasn't familiar with. She had pain killers and antidepressants prescribed at the hospital but apparently none of those orders are being observed at the SNF.
I'm going to try to take the bus (two bus systems) over there today to see what's going on in the afternoon.