January 31, 2010

My visit tonight with Dad seemed a little more solemn than usual.  Though he seems to have up and down days, I think Dad is becoming increasingly depressed.  His good hand (the right one) is swollen for some unknown reason, and is painful for him to use, so when I and my family showed up around dinner time, he was glad we were there.  He was sitting there staring at his tray of food with no way to feed himself, and said "Oh, well I was just going to flag a nurse down, but now since you're here, you can help me eat my dinner."  Dinner was manicotti, steamed vegetables, dinner roll, and vanilla pudding.  He didn't care for the manicotti, but ate most everything else.

We asked the nurse what might have happened to his hand and she suggested rheumatoid arthritis, but Dad has never had that in his life.  Apparently there is a blood test that can verify if that is in fact the problem.  So we have asked them to do that test.  Dad suggested the injury was caused when he nearly fell off his wheelchair during a shower and tried to catch himself with that arm and hit the elbow on the wheelchair or something else that was hard. 

He had been put on morphine last week due to his complaints of pain, but that rendered him too tired to go to his physical therapy, so they have taken him back off the morphine and tried Celebrex and possibly some other pain medications.  We will clarify all of that at the meeting with the staff on Wednesday.  He looks to me like he's losing muscle tone and that he might have lost some weight.  I am also going to ask the staff to weigh him again and compare that to the weight he was when he entered the care center.  I am not certain, but his knees both looked swollen to me as well, and his left arm is usually swollen and still is.

It is very difficult for us to reach Dad's doctor.  I've never run into him there in all my visits.  I am pretty sure the doctor had not been in to see him for possibly a month up until about a week ago.  Apparently even though Dad's injury to his right hand had been noted on Saturday morning by the nurse, the doctor had not been contacted by Sunday night, presumably because it was the weekend--when I asked why they hadn't figured out what was wrong with him yet, the nurse said, "We can't call the doctor now."  It seems pretty odd that a doctor would not be on call over the weekend hours.  I will also express our concerns about the lack of a doctor's supervision during the meeting on Wednesday.