NOW she is in hospice (Fri, 11 Mar 2011)

At five minutes before five on Friday afternoon I got a call from Bob, the High Desert Hospice social worker, telling me that they had just received the faxed paperwork from Dr. Kubac's office and mom is now officially in hospice. Earlier (around noon) mom and I had been in Kubac's office for her appointment, and he told us that he had signed the paperwork. However, when we got back out to RP, I called HD Hospice and they had not received it. They told me they'd call me back. About a half hour later someone called to say that Kubac had signed the wrong papers, but they were working with his office and they would call back when it was done. (I wonder if maybe he had signed the papers for KF Hospice instead, since we initially started with them.) Anyway, after no call for a while, about 4:30PM I called Kubac's medical records office and "Candy" told me kind of impatiently that she was already talking to HD Hospice and that they had faxed over the right papers, which were sitting on Kubac's desk right then awaiting his signature, and she hoped to get them faxed out before she left for the day. Apparently she succeeded. Bob told me that for some reason Kubac had agreed to be her physician, but he wanted the medical director of HD Hospice to be the primary, but fortunately that doesn't really change anything.

Mom's follow-up with Kubac showed that she had lost two more pounds in the past week and is now at 101 lbs. Her kidney function has not changed since last week. Kubac said that he had hoped that it would improve a bit, but at least it had not declined any more, and the rest of her blood values were the same as last week. Her blood pressure was 92/54. The bulging vein in her neck has gone down, because there isn't as much pressure from excess fluid in her body. Kubac wants to move slowly with changes in her drug regimen, so he kept the Torsemide the same but slightly increased her potassium. For those interested in the details, she is now taking 100mg Torsemide pills in the dosage of 1/2 pill one day alternating with 1 pill the next, and 20MEQ pills of potassium in the dosage of two pills each morning and one pill each evening.

At the end of our visit with Kubac, we talked a bit about hospice. he reminded her again that nobody can tell how long someone has left, but he did say (and this is an exact quote; I wrote it down) that she has "...a debilitating, serious, and ultimately fatal condition."