Joyce's KP Adventure mikepasini.com headlines
Back at the Piano
19 March 2025
Today the train left the station a little later than usual, so to speak. When I got to Joyce's room, she wasn't ready to get up. She needed "a change" and, she said, the nurse had scheduled her for later so she had to wait.
When she talks about "a change," it's hard to tell if she means a diaper change or a wound dressing change. I asked about the dressing and she said she had already had that.
But Binita, the wound care nurse, had the supply cart at the door and was just coming in to do the dressing change. Joyce had sent her away earlier when she normally does it (around 9:30 a.m., well before I get there at 11:30).
So I told Binita she also needed a diaper change. And Binita went to get the CNA. Together they helped each other do both things quickly and I even managed to get a look (and photo for Jennifer the RN who will debride it next week) of the wound.
After they left, Joyce sat up (with help) and dressed herself, brushed her hair and put on her mask. Then she walked out of the room with the walker to her wheelchair, which I had put in the hallway a few feet from the door.
She had no trouble at all.
We rolled down to the Pacific Room and pulled out the piano and set up her iPad 3 with some sheet music I had downloaded to it and she played a half dozen pieces. She laughed when she saw the last one: Anxiety, it was called.
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DAISY AND NEIL came by offering to walk her but it was after 12:15 so lunch was on its way. Not that she ate anything. But she did drink a few things, including another Boost. I had weighed her earlier. No change.
After lunch, Daisy and Neil caught up to us. Joyce protested. She didn't want to walk. Not today. Please.
But she got out of the chair and onto the walker and with Daisy on her left and Neil on her right and me behind her with the wheelchair, she shuffled down the long hallway past the fish tank and into the second half of the hallway before she took a break and sat down.
That was her longest stretch yet.
She continued walking that hallway, as she had Monday, and turned the corner, making it to the scale where Daisy weighed her. One pound more after lunch.
Neil got her back on the walker where she had left off and she walked around the next corner, completing the short hallway. That's the same 240 feet she had done on Monday.
With three of us cheering her on (despite her insistence she was done for the day), she made it back to the halfway point of the other long hallway. That's 330 feet, longer than a football field.
She wasn't at all tired but she was, she told me, scared.
The 10mg dose of Lexapro is intended to address that.
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WE WENT BACK to her room and visited for a while before I had to leave. But before I left, there was a knock at the door.
It was Deb, who manages the Reliant therapy services.
She told Joyce she had noticed her improvement lately, working on the SciFit and walking further with the RNAs. And she knows she wants to go home. So she was going to use Medicare Part B to resume her physical therapy (with Cassie, Kevin and Jayce) and occupational therapy. That would include stairs when she's ready, too. They'd evaluate her on Friday, in fact.
When my mother was in the SNF next door, the Franklin, Reliant manager of those physical therapy services, once complimented me on bringing my mother to the gym to play balloon tennis, among other things, and mentioned getting her Part B services. He told me the trick to Medicare approval was to have some goal toward which the patient was making progress. Wimbledon, in my mother's case.
It sounds like Deb has arranged the same deal for Joyce. Joyce is working out on the SciFit better this month. And she has walked a lot further than she had in months. Her goal? How about the Appalachian Trail?
Now if we could just get her to eat.