Advocate. You Must. At ALL Times.

And the saga continues . . .

When we last visited M, he was in the ER of a local hospital, not an inpatient, but being attended to by the psychiatric staff to stabilize his anxiety and moods to move him to a long-term care placement.

And where are we today, eleven days after M was first taken to the ER?

M is STILL in the ER of a local hospital. Not an inpatient. Being attended to by the psychiatric staff to stabilize his anxiety and moods, so he can be moved to a long-term care placement.

When I close my eyes, and allow myself to think about it, I see a spinning wheel, like the ones you would have seen on a gas pump in the 80s and 90s to show you the money owed as it spun around. Only, instead of numbers, all I see are dollar signs spinning. And spinning.

But I can’t think about that – or else I’ll end up in the behavioral health unit at a local hospital. And believe me when I tell you, there are not enough beds for everyone who needs one. M is an example of that.

This is why he is STILL not an inpatient – not enough beds in the inpatient unit. So he continues to be monitored and treated in the locked unit that is considered part of the ER. And I have to accept that it will all work out in the end.

On Monday of this week, I had no communication from the hospital, physicians or M. I tried to go with the thought that no news was good news and not worry about it. On Tuesday, I received a call from a social worker at the hospital and she let me know that M’s behavior had gotten worse over the weekend and beginning of the week (I wonder who warned them that might happen?) and that they had had to increase the amount of medication he was receiving.

The social worker also let me know that, because of the change in M’s behavior and the need to increase the amount of medication he was receiving, the long-term care placement had now said he would need to stay at the hospital for an additional week – to see how his behavior continued – before they would allow him to transfer and move in. Frustrating, but I understand. They have many dementia patients to be concerned about – they can’t have one come in there and disrupt everything.

On the good news front, the hospital sent a copy of M’s medical record, to date, to the long-term care placement and they forwarded it to me, too. So now I have a copy of everything that had been done through Tuesday.

On Wednesday, I spoke to a social worker again, who said M continued to be argumentative and combative and the psych provider was going to adjust his medications again. On the way home from work that afternoon, I received a phone call from the psychiatrist himself. He asked about M’s original diagnosis and several other questions that I knew were answered in his chart (since I had read it) but I didn’t mention that. We talked about the problems they were having with his aggression and the need to change him to a new class of medications – which he said he planned to start on Thursday.

So, imagine my surprise on Thursday afternoon, when a different social worker called me to say that M was being discharged.

Huh?

Yep. She said that Dr. S. (the psychiatrist I had spoken to the day before) was discharging him from a psych prospective. I don’t know what she thought I was going to do or say . . . maybe that I’d jump in the car and come pick him up?

You’ll be proud of me. I didn’t yell. I didn’t curse. But I did tell her that if M’s behavior was problematic enough for the psychiatrist to call me less that 24 hours ago to discuss a new class of medications, I found it very hard to believe that there had been THAT dramatic a turn around that he was now ready to be discharged and that either we were looking at a case of medical malpractice or someone kicking the can down the road for someone else to handle because they were tired of dealing with this situation.

The social worker conveyed my concerns to the psychiatrist and called me back within the hour to let me know that M would be staying at the hospital under observation until Monday.

I thanked her for letting me know – but what I didn’t tell her was that until M is cleared to move to the long-term placement, he will be staying right there where he is. He is NOT coming back home. It will be a challenge to move him from the hospital to long-term care. It would be IMPOSSIBLE to make that move from home. And I’m not going to try it. I worked in healthcare for 10 years and I know a thing or two. They can call me and tell me he’s discharged all they want to.

I get to choose when he leaves the hospital.

I saw this today in my IG feed and it reminded me why I write. If my ramblings can help just one person, then it’s all worth it.