Grandparents Redux

A lot of stuff has been happening over on my side, hence the reason I haven't dropped by very often recently. I'm leaving for Poland on Sunday, so most of my internet time is devoted to writing goodbye emails to my friends before I leave. Still, I wanted to give you an update on my grandparents, especially seeing as things have settled down slightly.

First: Grandma. We recieved a call from the home she was staying at, telling us she had fallen down. Of course they rushed her to the hospital, and we (Mom and I) met her there a day or so later. The doctors claimed that she was fine--only bruised on her hip. But when we took her back to the assisted living home, she was limping badly. It was clear she was still in pain. Leaving Grandma in her room, we dragged back to the hospital, where Dad picked me up (I was fading pretty badly at that point--it was maybe 8 at night, and I hadn't eaten) while Mom stayed to shout at the doctors.

Mom tells me she dragged through the hospital beaurocracy, demanding to see the x-rays of Grandma's hips, until finally she cornered a guy into admitting that there were no x-rays--at least, no x-rays of the hip she HADN'T fallen upon (this is important). I'm saying this calmly right now, but when Mom told us about it, believe me, she was furious. Can you believe they didn't do these x-rays?? I mean, come on, that's just routine when an old lady falls down!!

It turned out that Grandma had a fractured hip--on the other side. Essentially, she stood up, something snapped, and THEN she fell. The fracture was the cause, not the effect. The hip she fell on was just bruised; the other one was fractured. The description of the fracture is kinda tricky and I'm in a rush, so I'll skip that for now.

Anyways, Grandma went through surgery for her hip last week, and she came out of the hospital on Saturday. Now she's in rehab for her hip. I hope she's doing fine, but I haven't seen her since Friday.

Grandpa, meanwhile, has finally been diagnosed with middle-to-severe Alzheimer's. Stage 5-6. There are 7 stages in all. You're going to look at me crazy, but it's kind of a relief. You do not how much Mom struggled just to get him diagnosed. She was literally going around and around in circles as doctor after doctor referred her to someone else at Johns Hopkins.

Here is a true story about her dealings at Johns Hopkins: The other day she had to rush Grandpa over to the hospital, right? But there were no beds in the psychiatric ward at Johns Hopkins. She asked around the emergency room and EVERYONE there, doctors and nurses, told her that they could transfer him to another hospital where there were open beds. They said there was an ambulance waiting and everything. It was very late at night, so she went home. The next day she calls up the other hospital (Shepard something, I forget the name) and there was no record of his arrival. Instead, Grandpa had been registered in the MEDICAL ward at Johns Hopkins, even though he only needed psychiatric treatment. It turns out that he had to be registered first at the medical ward in Johns Hopkins before being transferred. No one--NO ONE--in the whole emergency room said anything of the sort to Mom. Either they didn't know about that rule, or they were lying to her. Tell me, which is scarier?

So as I said, it's actually good news that Grandpa has finally been diagnosed. He's now in a place called Levensdale, a research center for Alzheimer's. Only, the other day a nurse phoned my uncle Steve saying that Grandpa was lucid and wanted to go home. Then Uncle Steve got another call, this time from Grandpa himself, badgering him to take him home. What the hell?! How did this get through??