The next month and a half, from the time my father went into the hospital, to now, would be a rollercoaster ride for me. The situation was this: His diabetes was managed, and his pnemonia was gone. He was physically weak from lying in bed all day, and every other day, he would be in an extremely bad mood that he would snub the nurses and the caregiver, the doctor and the physical therapist and lay in bed all day. He ate puréed food because his swallowing was weak, and he often got angry that no one would give him bread, which was his favorite thing to munch on when he was hungry. And Eve came to the hospital everyday to keep him company and help out however she could.
The doctor recommended that he shouldn’t be home alone, ever. My dad’s finances can only cover a caregiver for 8 hours per day for 5 days. Not 24/7. So the hospital social worker started looking for a skilled nursing facility for him that accepted Medi-cal. After about a week, the social worker told me that they couldn’t find a place for my dad that accepted Medi-cal and told me they would discharge him and he will just have to go home alone. After much inner-panic and a bunch of research on my rights, I learned that a patient cannot be discharged if they don’t have a safe place to go. So I refused the discharge, and so he stayed at the hospital for another month, while they resumed their search to find for a place for him to go.
During that time, I was on the phone with the hospital almost every day, livid that they would continue to threaten his discharge because they couldn’t find him a place to go and they wanted their bed back. I spent the next week taking time off from work to visit nursing homes all over Southern California to no avail.
The social worker continued to tell me that they were going to discharge him AND that the bill for his hospital stay was going to be sent to me. And one day, I finally had it, and requested that she stop the threats. First, a hospital cannot discharge a patient if they don’t have a safe place to go, and secondly, once a hospital accepts a Medi-cal patient, the hospital cannot bill the patient or the patient’s family. The “threats” stopped and they continued their search.
My dad since had about 4 blood transfusions after the doctor discovered that he had low hemoglobin. They then discovered an ulcer in his intestine and thought they might have to perform surgery. This posed a HUGE risk to his life, and his sister flew down to visit him thinking that this might be the time, as my dad would have put it, that he “goes home to the Lord”.
The stress over all the uncertainty, and of course my own insecurities over whether I was being a good enough daughter, coupled with the resentment of being an only child who got the short end of the stick by having a father who had extreme moods and didn’t know how to manage it, etc. was so damn extreme that I honestly didn’t know what would be worse… Losing my dad to this ulcer or having him get better from it and continuing the rollercoaster of everyone’s sad attempts to making him happy.
And then he recovered. The bleeding stopped. The blood transfusions stopped, and his ulcer was healed.
And then the battle to keep him in the hospital continued… And the search to find him a proper nursing home also continued.
Adventures with my Elderly Father 