Monday, October 29, 2007

Searching for Hospice

Infections

She has completed the antibiotics for the Klebsiella pneumoniae infection. She seems to be slowly getting better. She is still fighting the multi-drug resistant C.Difficile Toxin infection so she is not out of the woods yet. But now she is not on antibiotics and she can start to build the good germs to fight the C-Diff.

In a regular room

She has been moved from ICU into a regular room. She is resting better now that she doesn't have fifty-eleven million wires, tubes, etc connected to her. We can also visit her with no time restrictions. She is in room 612 of St. Josephs.

Insurance "challenges"

The good news is that our insurance will cover 100% of in-network hospice care. They pay 0% of out-of-network facilities. Humm... I guess I'll stick with in-network hospice providers.

But here's the catch, the in-network facilities are not very close to our house. There's one in Decatur, one in Duluth, one in Dunwoody (the closest) and one near Emory Univ. The one that is closest in Marietta but is out-of-network. We tried to work with a in-network provider to get her placed there but have had no success. So we will work on it more tomorrow.

Palliative Care

She was assessed by a palliative care nurse today. She said that they could do a better job of managing her pain. She has still been in quite a bit of pain even though she could get a shot of morphine pretty much whenever she said she needed it. But this wasn't working so well. So now Trudie is on a very low dose continuous morphine drip. This seems to have helped her and she is in less pain now.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Trudie, you are taking baby steps in the right direction! Soon you will be a toddler. I'm still praying for you.

Juanita

robinshadburn said...

So glad to here she is out of ICU. That will be so much better with no time restrictions. We want to send her a card, but I think I am just going to send it to the house, if you will take it to her!! Please let us know if you need help with anything, including hospice. Give her our love and know we are thinking of you both.
Dr. Johary, Robin, Leslie, Catherine, Carole and China