Hospital Adventure: Hospital at Home

If you’d told me a week ago that we’d survive 5 days and 4 nights in the hospital with Adrian, I would have thought you were crazy.  But not only did we survive it, things actually went fairly well under the circumstances.

Yesterday they applied a hard cast to his foot,  verified that the antibiotic he’s on is the right one for the job and set us up with some home nursing care once a week.  With all that out of the way, we were finally discharged last night. 

I had just enough time to get in the door, clean up, take a shower and prepare for the nurse to come.  Still short on sleep and stressed about working out all the issues with having him home, I anxiously awaited the arrival of the nurse who was coming to make sure I knew how to give him his antibiotics through the PIC IV line.

I can’t begin to say how relieved I was to find that the nurse they’d sent was an aquaintence from church.  I said, “It’s you!” , took a deep breath, fell against the wall and relaxed for the first time in what seemed like days.  The visit went well, she was great and by the time she left I felt that I could take the medication stuff off my list of things to worry about.

We’re pretty much doing the ‘hospital at home’ thing right now.  Someone is always with him, we’re keeping him moving and entertained as best we can.  We brought his wheelchair in the house and with some furniture moved out of the way he can access the kitchen, family room, bathroom and my husband’s office by scooting the wheelchair along with his good foot.

We’ve tried the crutches a few times with little success.  It takes quite a bit of coordination and he’s just not got it yet.  We’ll probably keep at it if only for something else to do to keep from going stir crazy.

We set up a bed for Adrian in our room so we could keep an eye on him.   It made it a bit easier to do his meds at 4 am too.  I’m still working on a way to get him back in his own bed.  I may try some particle board ‘walls’ around his bed to prevent him from getting up without us.

I’m hoping that we can work out ways to make things easier over the next couple of days… but even if we don’t I think we can probably survive a couple of months this way.   After all, we survived 5 days in the hospital!  Makes me think we can handle just about anything 🙂