Not the right ward
This is the third incarnation of my RTC3 blog which started here, but for the moment is taking on a new life recording my darling Janet's recovery from an ischaemic stroke, the result of an unusually difficult TAVI (Trans-catheter Aortic Valve Implantation). The entry here gives background information.
The main trouble with ward Seven West is that it's not the right ward for the help Janet needs. Its speciality according to the hospital website is supposed to be gastroenterology, but the bay she's in gives the impression of being a dumping-ground for patients who can't be found a bed elsewhere in the hospital. She was supposed to be seen by a therapist and a neurologist today, but there was no sign of the neurologist and I had to plead for a therapist to come and see her. Also she was still in her nightdress when I arrived, since no-one had bothered to make sure she got herself dressed. (At least that was something I managed to achieve.) Interestingly (alarmingly!?), whereas when she was at Clayponds she was always saying how kind the staff were, here she was saying how kind some of the other patients had been (particularly a young woman in the next bed who had epilepsy), but didn't seem too taken with the staff.
The brief visit from the therapist was apparently the only therapy she'd had that day (and of course there hadn't been any over the weekend), which just gave her all the more time to brood over the ward transfer that had been handled so badly on Saturday evening - or was it actually in the small hours of Sunday morning? Sadly she is still fixated on this, and it seems almost impossible to shake her off it. I did persuade her to read for a short while, but she couldn't concentrate and gave up after a few sentences. (Fortunately it wasn't quite so dark today, since it will apparently take weeks for the light above her bed to be fixed, and the only solution would be for her to change beds to where there is a working light - not that there are many of those in her current bay!)
The therapist told me that Janet needs to have a "stairs assessment" before she's discharged, but that that needs two therapists. I'm hoping that they'll manage to accomplish that tomorrow morning, but unfortunately the relevant therapists are mostly on the ninth floor where the stroke units are. Ward Nine West is the Neurorehabilitation Unit, which is presumably where the neurologist will eventually come from, once one of them can be persuaded to make the journey down two floors. It will be interesting to see what (if anything) they can discover, and what (if anything) they can do to improve matters. It may be my imagination, but I have an uneasy feeling that Janet's visual perception has worsened somewhat since the seizure. And I still find her flights of fancy extremely worrying. Nevertheless, I suspect getting her home again as soon as possible is likely to be the best course of action.
