As
it turns out, my mention of the possibility of traveling over the Thanksgiving
holiday got me in a bit of trouble. After
my last blog entry on the subject I heard from my hospice nurse. She had
no idea I was thinking about going out of town for Thanksgiving. Not to
put too fine a point on it, I got spanked. Not a bad one, but it was definitely
a trip to the woodshed. I am, she pointed out, in hospice care.
Someone like me doesn't just pull up stakes, hit the road and start
rubbernecking. Her concerns were all the same as those I'd already
expressed, and they all boil down to the same thing: what if some kind of
medical emergency were to arise while I am on the road? Apparently the routine
is to arrange in advance with another hospice agency to be ready to step in and
take care of me in that eventuality. But if I'm going to be gone for more
than one week they actually ask the hospice patient to resign the care temporarily
and signup with the hospice agency in the area to which I'll be
traveling. Can you beat that? At any rate it sure drove home the
seriousness of my situation. It’s almost like now, in addition to
everything else, I have to worry about a tree trunk falling on me, or something
worse.
Another
medical development today—I now have oxygen in the house, consisting of two
emergency bottles and an oxygen generator.
This is to guard against my next
hard breathing/panic attack, of which I had another relatively mild one on
Wednesday. It wasn’t a bad one (thank
God) but was it was severe enough to get my attention. The aftermath leaves me with a tightness of
breath across my chest and abdomen, which is no fun, and also with a line of
pain across the top of my back. It’s
usually gone within 12 hours, though.
Company
is coming tomorrow, so I probably won’t write for a couple of days.
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