Not Quite There Yet (Thu, 10 Mar, 2011)

Well, mom is not quite signed up for hospice yet, but almost. There was a small kink in the smooth process yesterday afternoon. Bob, the HD Hospice social worker, called me at about 4:45pm to report that they had called Kubac's office and his nurse said that they had no record of mom initiating hospice and that Kubac had not agreed to be her physician for hospice! I told him we would investigate and get back to him.

I asked mom if there was any chance that maybe she had misunderstood Kubac when he told her he "would be honored" to do it. She indignantly told me that when your favorite doctor tells you something like that, there is NO MISTAKING IT!!!!!! Mom was in a giant tizzy over this, so she called Kubac's office, but the office manager was gone for the day. (Mom had shared the news with the office manager on the day that Kubac agreed, and all the front office staff were flabbergasted because he NEVER agrees to working with hospice.) So mom described the problem to the receptionist and said that she would call the office tomorrow.

A little while later, Kubac's nurse called and apologized. Somehow there had been a miscommunication in their office and she had not been aware of Kubac's agreement but she is now! She had already called HD Hospice to let them know, but Kubac wanted to wait until Friday when he sees mom again to officially start hospice care. (I am not sure why, but oh well, we'll go with it.) Apparently the nurse is relatively new, and mom said that she really respected her for calling and admitting her error and immediately correcting it. So assuming that all goes well on Friday, no big deal other than about 20 minutes of mom's intense turmoil and angst when she was already fatigued and in a cranky mood.

This morning mom got up at 8:30am and told me that she was exhausted because she hadn't been able to get to sleep until 1am. I am never sure whether to believe her when she talks about how she didn't sleep, because I've noticed that she reports not being able to sleep when I have actually seen her sleeping. I think she may not be totally aware of whether she sleeps or not. But in any case, she was definitely still very tired when she got up, so she asked me to build her a fire and she went back to bed. Fortunately there are no apointments of other plans today so she can sleep as much as she wants.