Page 113 - FDCC Pandemic Book

Living in a Pandemic: A Collection of Stories on Coping, Resilience & Hope
I quickly realized that nothing I had done the day before had meaningfully prepared us to care for my mother. The fresh sheets were ridiculous--we needed to rent a hospital bed. The wheelchair and shower bench purchases had been naively optimistic—we were in bed pan and sponge bath territory. The snacks and comfort foods I had acquired were the exact opposite of what the doctor had ordered for a patient with a severe pelvic injury and the potential for opioid-induced constipation from her pain medication. Her needs were overwhelming, and I had no idea what I was doing.
LESSON 2 - LEARN FROM YOUR MISTAKES.
I was struggling to frame an intelligent Google search on how to solve this problem when a social worker from the hospital called to schedule mom’s first outpatient therapy appointments. The poor woman had probably planned on making a five- minute call, but I grabbed the opportunity like the lifeline that it was. She spent an hour helping us understand some of the basics. When I went to the drug store that afternoon, I had a shopping list of items I had never known existed: bed pan liners, dry shampoo gloves, etc. When mom’s occupational and physical therapists came to the house the next day, they also spent time teaching us with the basics of patient care.
Go figure – things got better once I had proper equipment and a little training. But my mother could have been spared some really uncomfortable moments if I had asked better questions of the nurse who asked me to decide where my mother would spend her recovery time. It was my responsibility to make a medical decision for her, and I arrogantly made that decision while laboring under the pretense that I knew what I was doing.
I won’t make this mistake again. My mother had specialized needs that were entirely outside my wheelhouse, and I know that is going to continue. I have learned to ask a lot of questions, rather than acting on instinct, before helping with decisions about her care.
My willingness to act on impulse was not the only problem. I simply had not done enough to educate myself about the details of my mother’s health or the reality of how she had been managing on her own before the fall. Although her pelvic fracture was unanticipated, the need for a trip to the emergency room should not have been. I knew that I might someday have to make a medical decision for my mother – I am the person who drafted the documents that say so. But I was not able to answer basic questions about her prescription medications.
Today, my husband and I are more active participants in our parent’s health care. Our parents have given their physicians signed releases, and we’ve set up the online patient portals our parents had had no interest in. Just as attorneys have had to learn
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