Not as bad as I feared! They did keep him at the SNF for two extra days, until Dec 23, due to the social worker not knowing how to navigate the Medicare approval of his feeding tube. Mainly due to the fact that he also eats via mouth. Thank goodness I have the Managed Long Term Care agency to fall back on, they arranged for it and are paying for it in the end too. All the home did was send a bed, oh and a shower seat I didn't even need. I even had to pay for the little wheeled table that goes with the bed but did so gladly. Ray loves having it nearby even though he sits in his wheelchair all day now. All his things are arranged on it just so, the same way he did at the place.

So after all that, the feeding tube ended up being an electric pump one, which is fail proof. Ray seems to love it, to the point that I can't get him to eat much else except breakfast, and numerous glasses of chocolate milk throughout the day. I don't think things taste very good to him anymore, in general. But he's not starving, even though they cut him back drastically on the liquid food when he started eating again; hard to weigh him when he can't stand up but I'm betting he's gained weight just since he came home. And he was a good few pounds over before that, too.

I was also worried that they had never taken him in the bathroom the whole time, just changed him in bed with a team of two aides. I begged them to get him back to normal with that, but I could see they weren't. Luckily, he came home and went right back to the way we used to do it, he tells me when and I take him there just as we always did. What a relief! I was so worried I wouldn't be able to handle any of this, but it's not really that bad after all. No worse than before, anyway!

He's been home a week and a half already, and it's been a non-stop carousel of course: Two nurses, one from each agency, both full of excellent info; PT OT and Speech, all twice a week; doctor office visits galore and all that fun stuff. He is doing great, so much more energy than he had the last year or so, they really did a good job on him. And everyone seeing him now, whether for the first time or not, comments on how animated he is and that he is so much further along than I was thinking. Getting off the tube is a real possibility somewhere down the road. Life is good ;-)