I'm baaaaaaack!
Entry posted by 1967stingray
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The beginning of the month, I was on a mission to clean the house, inside and out, as if guests were coming, and also the yard, and I was really getting somewhere for a change. Then Ray got a terrible bronchitis kind of cough so I had to attend to that; we did an emergency doctor visit, then I was dosing him with antibiotics and Robitussin, changing his diet to eliminate dairy and generally watching over him while he was sick, poor baby. He got over that quickly enough, then a week later.....the thing everyone fears happened. He has fallen down at the top of the stairs a couple of times over the last few weeks; it's so weird, he is fine everywhere else except when he comes to that top step. He doesn't really fall (or heaven forbid, fall down the stairs), he's still holding the bannister but sort of goes down and rolls over on the landing. The first time may have been he was weak from the coughing; that last step has a lip and he caught his bad foot on it, but then it became psychological and he hesitated and stiffened up like a board every time he got there. I couldn't get his leg to bend at all, then he'd get scared he was going to fall and lean forward, and down he went. I had vague plans to ask for an in home PT to come and help me figure it out at some point.
So, after a really nice day out last Thursday (local art museum and late lunch at a well known steak house), he fell again on the way to bed later that night. I had been thinking it's lucky we have the psychiatrist coming up in a week or two: Besides the falling, he also seems a little spacy and doesn't answer me half the time when I talk to him; I was hoping it might be the cough (diagnosed as a possible virus, there was no congestion in the lungs) not to mention the meds he took for it. But the psychiatrist keeps mentioning Aricep and now I'm glad he did, just in case. I just didn’t know what to think, he has always been so sturdy since the stroke. Now he is scaring me a little, going downhill it seems whether real or not.
Unfortunately the next morning Ray woke up with his bad arm completely swollen and black and blue. He does take a daily baby aspirin, but still. I gave him some Aleve and iced it, and tried to get him up to go to ER but he would not get out of bed, even when the aide arrived. But he was being mellow, trying to fake us out or maybe the Alleve was working so no real pain. Lots of phone calls to our doctor and the agency nurses and it was agreed I'd take him to the hospital as soon as I could get him up. Ended up being Saturday morning, 9AM (like the break of dawn for him!)
So we come to find it’s broken. The humerus bone, why it's named that I don't know because I'm not laughing! They put on a crude cast and also gave me a sling, then left me in charge of finding an orthopedic surgeon for an operation to mend it. Since then, Ray will not come upstairs and is sleeping on the couch, I could only take that for one night myself. He says he’ll eventually come back upstairs but when he can’t say. So our lives are sort of in turmoil, boy I thought things were bad before but I didn’t realize it could get worse.
Meanwhile we don’t have a shower or tub downstairs, despite plenty upstairs, so I’m learning about sponge baths in the meantime. Of course the aide is of no use, although her only other clients use her ONLY for showering. I asked her advice and all she said was it will be really hard for me. She also refuses to take him to the bathroom now, she calls me to come do it. Her nurse was here the other day and was on her case, especially because it turned out that she never reported Ray’s broken arm! She said she had to call it in the first day she came but was more concerned about some missing hours on her paycheck, she called but I guess she forgot about the big story she had to report. She is so uncompassionate, it’s scary. She’s obviously only in this for the money, she gets paid a bit more than her old Walmart job plus she THINKS she is unsupervised. Enough about her though, she’s still here and sadly I’m getting used to her shenanigans. I hadn’t even written for awhile because I was tired of complaining about her so much.
Finally a week later, we had our appointment with the orthopedic surgeon. Turns out the break is clean and minimally displaced, and Ray didn't really need a cast, just a sling. As a matter of fact, the cast the ER room put on wasn’t even covering the break! The orthopedist removed the cast, said just use the sling, so now I can finally scrub him down with no worries about getting the cast wet. No operation either (which the ER doc said was a definite, whew) and no therapy, due to his arm being out of commission anyway. That’s as good as it gets for us.
In happier news, my sister in California has set up a family reunion in her husband’s home town of Cody Wyoming the end of the summer, something to look forward to. It will be our first time on a plane since Ray’s stroke, and if not for Nancy and Dan flying all over I’d be petrified. But I made the plane reservations so nothing will stop us now (hopefully ;-))
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