Hat Tip: Christina
Terri Schiavo's brother Bobby Schindler has written an article for WorldNetDaily. Reading it made me think back to after Christmas of 2004. My grandmother, who had been recovering from health problems, had bumped her head when she missed the seat of a chair at her kitchen table. A few days afterwards, she suffered from a subdural hematoma. As a result, she lost all most all motor skills, speech, and short-term memory, as well as suffering seizures brought on by the bleeding on the surface of her brain. In the following year, she spent almost nine months in the hospital. During that time, our whole family spent our time in shifts at the hospital, and we got to know the extended care staff quite well.
We were fortunate that the nursing staff were, for the most part, very understanding and actually happy that we, as a family, were so involved with Grandma's care. There was one woman, though, who infuriated me to no end. She was an occupational therapist, which means that she was largely in charge of helping recover motor skills. In the early months of her recovery, Grandma slept a lot because the seizures were physically exhausting. Rather than checking in on Grandma multiple times throughout the day (to see if she was awake), the OT would come in once a day and quickly depart if Grandma happened to be asleep or too exhausted to do the exercises. After about a month and a half, the OT obnoxiously told us that Grandma would be discharged from extended care and her insurance cut off if she did not begin to "make progress". The picture that she painted was one of hopelessness, so convinced was she that my grandmother would not be able to recover from her injuries. I wish that she could see my grandmother now.
While Grandma is still in a wheelchair, she can help move from it to a regular seat. She still has some trouble with her memory, but I am able to spend over an hour on the phone talking to her. To think that there are people out there that would have wanted to euthanize my grandmother because she did not have the same "quality of life" that she had prior to her injury. These same people would think that my mother and aunt are "burdened" because Grandma cannot take herself to doctor's appointments and the grocery store. We know how blessed we are to still have Grandma with us. I am looking forward to her being around to see more graduations and for all of us grandkids get married.
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3 comments:
And then there was the nursing staff who waited AN HOUR to call a doctor when my terminally ill, hospitalized grandfather had a stroke. :( Not cool. The fact that a person is going to die soon doesn't excuse lousy care.
That truly is inexucusable! Some nurses that we encountered at first were trying to justify their lack of attention by telling us that the state caused them to be under-staffed, under-equipped, etc. Mind you, this was at a CHW facility (which is a privately-run, not-for-profit, hospital). Unfortunately, we too learned that the quality of nursing staff care varies from day-to-day and nurse-to-nurse.
The state of the health care system in California is generally pretty lousy. At least, that's what I hear from people I know who are employed in it. The attitudes that give us abortion, and "backdoor euthanasia" as well as the nutty health care policies of the state legislature are certainly behind it.
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