Thursday, July 31

My warpath mentality by the time I left the skf on Tuesday evening seems to have hit home. I am happy to report that there was a definite improvement at the skf yesterday. It helped that before returning, I talked on the phone with my wonderful friend, Gaie, who is a nursing professor and has worked at rehab centers in Michigan. She filled me in on the realities of the skfs, including the fact that almost all of them are understaffed and the staff who are there are underpaid. That softened my pique. She has also given me a lot of good tricks of the caregiver trade, including how to win friends and influence therapists at the skf. Yesterday I noticed some improvements. There were two particularly good nurses on duty (Rule #1 from Gaie--figure out who the best nurses are and get to know them, maybe even send them flowers), and they were emphatic about checking on things for me.
For example, Tommy was supposed to have a weighted knife and fork, and also a plate barrier (so that he can push his food against it)--if he has these tools, he can feed himself. But when I got there, an aide was feeding him and the utensils weren't there yet. I told the nurse that he can feed himself if he has his proper utensils and asked where they were. She got on the horn, tracked them down, and had someone hand-deliver them right on the spot--scoring her one point with the Connie bitch.
Then I asked her about why straws were in Tommy's drinks when the OT guy had told me during his assessment in the morning that if the speech therapist at Milford hadn't allowed Tommy to use straws, they wouldn't allow them here either, until they'd had a chance to fully assess his ability to use them. So, I asked the nurse--oh, have they assessed the straws already? She said she hadn't known anything about straws, but she immediately removed them from Tommy's drinks and then, five minutes later, she said, "I've gone right to the top with this question, because it's important...I called the Director of Nursing and she's going to take care of it." Well.
Now I was really on a roll, so I mentioned that even though the dietary guy had gone over Tommy's drink preferences with me in person the previous afternoon, at which time I had said--and he had written down--that the only drinks Tommy likes are apple juice and iced tea, and that he won't drink anything else, and dietary guy had assured me that Tommy would get only those drinks, nonetheless Tommy's breakfast tray had had orange juice and coffee and his dinner tray now had cola and nothing else. The nurse immediately filled out a very official "dietary change order" and wrote down what I told her and said, "You be sure to let the nurse know if you get any more strange drinks."
So I do think that there's hope.