Homeward Bound

Second time was a charm. Eliot & Company tried again to wean me off the trach. This time they were a bit more conservative. We went from capping the cannula for one hour to maybe three hours, then five, etcetera. Anyway, this time it took...I was able to breathe on my own! You can't imagine

Weaning

what a joy it was to finally be oxygen independent after all those months of being tethered to R2D2 or a wall or a tank. I felt like a real human being for the first time in a very long time. Truth be told, I really couldn't walk very well, but I knew I would soon be going home! Home, where my thought's escaping! Home, where my music's playing! I was ecstatic. The fact that Big Brother Oxford was the deciding vote regarding my imminent discharge was of no concern to me; I just wanted OUT! Apparently leaving a nursing home is no simple matter. We had a meeting on the third floor (I had never been higher than the first). It was me and Chayie and Eliot and Stacy (social worker) and a bunch of other people whom I don't remember. I think one was a dietician*. I recently asked Chayie if she remembered who was there and she said "a bunch of people who needed something to do so they could justify their salaries". Hmmm...makes sense to me. There were those little Halloween-sized Hershey Bars, Almond Joys, Mounds and Three Musketeerses (Musketeerses?) on the table. I love that stuff. They talked about a discharge plan but I was too antsy to be paying close attention. The one little detail that I did find interesting was the fact that they were planning on discharging me without oxygen. I wasn't sure that was good idea and I said so. Eliot explained that Oxford had a policy whereby they determined whether or not they would cover oxygen. If a patient's sats were below 90, you got your oxygen: tanks, mini-tanks, concentrator, the whole nine yards. If you were 90 or above, you were on your own. At the time of the meeting my sats were in the mid-90's. How arbitrary! How stupid! Eliot didn't disagree with me, but there was nothing he could do. Anyway, when they noticed that I wasn't paying much attention they just put everything in writing and handed me a beautiful forest green, gold embossed folder with my discharge papers and my diploma (see above) inside. It was wonderful: I hadn't graduated from anything since 1968. Most of the stuff in the folder made sense and was fairly accurate. A few things were questionable, and one little piece of misinformation could well have killed me...stay tuned!

* Here's an interesting little aside. Or maybe not so interesting. You decide. Anyway, when I spell-checked this post, as I always do, the word "dietician" was highlighted as incorrect. According to Blogger, it's spelled "dietitian". Well, that just looked weird to me, so I went to my old standby, Dictionary.com. According to them, either one is correct. Just thought you'd like to know.