April 2, 2016. After staying up last night until after 11:00 P.M. following Dad’s fistula fiasco, the 4:30 A.M. alarm seemed to come just moments after I placed my head on my pillow. By the time that I had dressed and started the coffee, the light was on in my parent’s room. Dad’s incision site had bled only slightly during the night. After eating breakfast and administering meds, Mom and I took Dad to dialysis. When we arrived, he weighed 153.34 lbs., which was about 3 lbs. more than his dry weight. After getting him settled in for his three-hour session, Mom and I left for home around 7:30 A.M. When we returned to pick him up, his RN, Melissa, showed him how to find the thrill in his arm. Following fistula surgery, when you place your fingers over the fistula, instead of feeling a pulse, you feel a whooshing that feels almost like a cat’s purr. This whooshing vibration is the thrill. His post-dialysis weight was 150.92 lb.
Dad’s fistula would need to cure for a couple of months before he could use it for hemodialysis. Dad’s surgeon, Dr. Jaffers, had told him that he should check his thrill on a daily basis. If he could not feel it, he should contact his doctor, and he’d probably need surgery to repair the fistula.
While my husband, Stan, was in town, he mowed the lawn and sprayed weeds. After lunch, Dad took a nap, and Stan and I drove to the Miller Springs Nature Center near Lake Belton to find some accessible trails that Dad might be able to walk. The trails seemed a bit less than optimal and appeared to be a little damaged. I was pretty certain that Dad would have a difficult time navigating them with a cane or a wheelchair.
My lack of sleep was starting to take its toll on me, and when we returned home, I needed a nap. Fortunately, I woke up in time for happy hour. After dinner, dad was feeling well enough to play cards, and I won.
April 3. According to Mom, Dad’s incision seeped a bit more during the night. While Mom and I went to church, Dad and Stan stayed home and played cribbage. As Mom and I were walking into the church, my phone rang. It was the home-care nurse, Paula, and she wanted to come by and admit Dad into Scott & White Home Care. When our friend and nurse practitioner, Sue, heard about Dad’s ordeal with the fistula surgery, she was more than a little exercised, and she could not believe that the incision was still seeping blood. She said that “bleeding wasn’t supposed to happen.” I told her that I have hundreds of pages of documentation full of things that “shouldn’t have happened” to my father.
Because Sue had been so worried about Dad’s continued bleeding, we checked Dad’s dressing as soon as we returned home. Paula arrived at 1:00 P.M., shortly after we had finished replacing the adhesive on the dressing. Paula offered to change his dressing, but we decided to wait until we heard from Dr. Jaffers. Because she was part of the Scott & White network, she was able to email Dr. Jaffers to see how soon we could have the dressing changed.
It was comforting to have my nursing lifeline back.
April 4. I logged on to Dad’s MyChart account at Scott & White and saw that Dad’s appointment with Dr. Jaffers had been rescheduled to a later date. At the start of his office hours, I called Patsy, Dr. Jaffers’s secretary, to see why our appointment had changed. Her phone number had been one of the numbers that I had called in response to Dad’s bleeding after the surgery. When she heard that it was me calling, she said that she was getting ready to return my call from Friday evening. I also told her about the drainage of Dad’s dressing and thought that it should be changed. When I told her that I had photographed it with my phone, she asked me to text the photo to her cell. She soon returned my call and told me to take Dad to the dialysis center and have the nurses change his dressing. To ensure that we wouldn’t encounter a problem there, I called the charge nurse to let her know that the doctor had instructed us to drop by. Dad and Mom left a few minutes later and had no problem getting Renee, one of the nurses, to change the dressing. She and some of the others there were a little disturbed about the problems that he had encountered. Unbelievably, it seems that he was the first person ever to have problems of this nature. Of course.
This afternoon while I was working, I looked out the window and saw Dad holding the cane with his right hand and dragging a garden hose with the arm that had just had surgery. I immediately ran outside to help him. My major concern was that he might fall, but he also seemed out of breath, and then there was the issue with his arm. I got him to rest for a minute before he headed out to the garden to see my mother, who was planting cucumber seeds. It was pretty warm out, so I wasn’t wild about either them being in the direct sun.
At 4:00 P.M. I ended work so that I could download some bank statements and transaction statements for Dad. We finished at 4:30 P.M., and then I took a short walk to stretch my legs. We had a nice happy hour and watched the news before eating a tender chicken that had been stewing in a crock pot. We played cards after dinner, and my mother won. We hit the hay a little early. I did a little packing and gathering for my trip home on Wednesday, two days from now.
April 5. I was up early and had to wake Mom and Dad with the “good morning” song. They were moving a little slow but they were up and out of the house by 6:15 A.M. When Mom returned from dropping off Dad at the dialysis center, she said that they planned to remove 3,300 ml of fluid today, but they would also add fluid, so the net amount removed would be closer to 2,000 ml. I’m no nephrologist, but I wasn’t sure why they didn’t just remove 2,000 ml.
After lunch, Dad took a nap. He was sleeping soundly, and I had a difficult time waking him. He finally got up at 2:45 P.M., 45 minutes after I started trying to wake him. The rest of the day went well. He and I talked about dinner plans for Saturday, and I went to the store to buy him a battery and some food. After dinner, we played cards, and Mom won.
It was after dinner when the day went to Hell. It seemed to me like Dad was out of breath. Concerned, I checked his oxygen level, and it was fine, but his heart rate was 132. I had been hoping that he would start weaning himself from the wheelchair, but the more we talked, the more apparent it became that he wasn’t getting rid of the wheelchair. According to Dad, the wheelchair was the only comfort that he had. Furthermore, he didn’t trust Dr. Pfanner and thought that he’d keep coming up with excuses for not pulling Dad’s PEG tube. Dad then shared a bucketful of excuses for not walking or getting rid of the wheelchair and not exercising. When our discussion turned into a heated argument, Mom came into the room and asked what we were arguing about.
Dad seemed to be in the midst of a terrible pity party, and he couldn’t seem to see his way out. I was a little concerned because he seemed depressed. I’m no expert, but I knew that he was in pain, which probably contributed to his attitude and outlook on life.
I was too tired to continue the fruitless conversation, and I went upstairs to bed. I could hear the television, and it was on for quite a while. Evidently, Dad went to bed late after watching Ted Cruz give his victory speech in Wisconsin. By the time he went to bed, he didn’t like Ted Cruz.
April 6. I dragged myself out of bed at 3:45 A.M. and was logged on to work 15 minutes later. Mom and Dad were up by 6:00 A.M., and I stopped work at 7:30 A.M. so that the three of us could eat Mom’s homemade banana muffins for breakfast.
At 10:00 A.M., I took a brief break from work when Kathleen arrived to administer a physical therapy assessment for Dad. Following her assessment, she said that she would put him on an aggressive rehab plan so that he could walk with or without a cane. Kristen, the speech therapist, also called this morning and scheduled a session time with Dad on Friday afternoon. I would be in Houston on Friday and was disappointed that I wouldn’t get to see her.
I called Dr. Pfanner’s office and tried to get a straight answer from his nurse about whether or not Dad needed to take another MBSS before he could have the PEG tube removed. After not getting a straight answer, I emailed her again and restated my question in writing.
I left Temple for my home in Houston at 12:43 P.M. and arrived home shortly after 3:30 P.M. I was pretty tired for the last 40 minutes of the drive and forced myself to stay awake. Stan got home from work about an hour later.
It seemed like I had been gone for quite a while, and it was good to be home again with Stan and our cats. Stan fixed us a nice dinner of turkey breast, and it was moist and yummy. After dinner, we made reservations for our trip to Wisconsin this September. My friends had surprised me with a girlfriend trip to Wisconsin to celebrate a milestone birthday last year, but my father’s situation had required a postponement of our plans, and this trip was our time to get together at last.
April 7. Because I would be working from home today, I was able to sleep in until 4:00 A.M., and lounge around and watch the news until 5:30 A.M. I finally got to my home office above my garage at 6:00 A.M., close to the time that Mom and Dad were on their way to the dialysis center back in Temple.
Back in Temple, Dad had 1,800 ml of fluid removed during dialysis and his nurse also removed his dressing. Sue, the dialysis nurse practitioner and our friend, had been very concerned about Dad’s progress and stopped by to ensure that his fistula was healing well.
I worked until 5:00 P.M. and then called Mom for a quick update on their day. After Dad’s nap, they spent quite a bit of time outdoors in their garden, planning a drip line. When I called them, they were watching the news and enjoying happy hour.
After I spoke with Mom, I set up an account with WordPress so that I could begin sharing Dad’s story, a story that I hoped would be ending soon.
Tale of Two Parents 