Nurse Cheryl, mom’s night nurse at Woodland Terrace, just called. She seemed to have no recollection of talking to me last week and I had to remind her that we’d talked. Whatever. She was calling to tell me that she was filing an incident report for mom.
Nurse Cheryl said that a CNA had checked on mom at 5:30pm and she was fine, but that just now there was a small, bleeding cut under her nose and her lips appeared swollen, as if she had banged her face on something.
She said that the CNA told her it didn’t seem serious, and that after wiping her face she was able to get mom out of bed and she ate about 75% of her dinner, that she seems fine. Nurse Cheryl said that they keep asking her what happened, but mom, “isn’t letting them know.” She said it’s really tiny and looks like just a scratch.
Nurse Cheryl told me that mom simply cries all the time, and that it’s “really sad.” I told her I was aware. She said that she doesn’t seem to know why she’s crying — I insisted that she’s been crying like this for months now — but that maybe it’s because, “she came in with a really bad rash on her bottom,” and wondered if that was why. I told her I didn’t know that she had a rash, but that I highly doubted it was related to mom’s depression, because — I explained again — she’s been crying like that for many months. At this point I felt it prudent to give Nurse Cheryl the five-minute history of Kathie Gagne that I’ve now given approximately seventy-three million times to nurses and doctors and administrators all over Volusia County.
She agreed that it was very sad. Then she let me know that mom was in a “low bed” because they are worried about her hurting herself because she keeps trying to get out of bed; I told her I already knew that.
Nurse Cheryl said that she seems more alert now, and in general mom seems less agitated than she was when she arrived. She thinks it might be related to discontinuing all the psycho pharmaceuticals, and I told her I thought that might be true, too.
I told Nurse Cheryl that I’d call in about an hour when I left my office and hopefully I’d be able to talk to mom then if she could help me get her to a phone. She assured me she would.