As I’m pretty sure I mentioned, my brother was admitted last Friday the 13th for the FOURTH TIME since our Mom’s funeral on 2\/13\/18.<\/p>\n
He has a multitude of problems, but the big ones have been pneumonia and profound anemia.\u00a0 This time he has bilateral pneumonia (he’s been a smoker since his late teens and he’s in his 70’s now).\u00a0 And his hemoglobin kept dropping, and finally when it got down to 7.0 they transfused him – but just with one unit.\u00a0 (Not unreasonable, because if you transfuse a large amount it shuts down bone marrow production because the feedback mechanism says “I don’t need to make any more RBCs.”)<\/p>\n
His hospitalist told him yesterday morning he would be in for 2-3 more days.\u00a0 His son, (SF Bay area)\u00a0 daughter-in-law (Tampa Metro – but 55 miles away) and I (KCMO) were ecstatic.\u00a0 My brother hated it.<\/p>\n
So we made plans with his health support people accordingly.<\/p>\n
But then the pulmonary service came in the afternoon and said he could be discharged.<\/p>\n
Us – BOO!\u00a0<\/strong><\/em> My brother – YEA!<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n So he was dismissed last night.\u00a0 So today we’ve been scrambling to get meds, health aide, PT, OT Social Worker, Nurse Practitioner all going again.<\/p>\n My nephew will be going out a week from tomorrow to help get lots of things done involving his wife’s estate (she died last Labor Day weekend) and our Mom’s estate taken care.\u00a0 Plus check to be sure he’s gotten everything done to transition to Medicare, as he’s a retiring college professor (economics) and has been using his work’s insurance, which ends in early May.<\/p>\n I’m hoping things will settle down.\u00a0 He does have a PCP, a hematologist-oncologist, a GI doc, a neurologist, an endocrinologist, an ENT doc, and I’m sure I’m leaving out a few.\u00a0 So it’s not like he hasn’t tried to find out what’s going on.\u00a0 But the pieces haven’t come together.<\/p>\n He and his wife lived in the KCMO Metro very close to me for several years when he was teaching at another college – and liked it.\u00a0 I’m actually hoping he’d agree to move back because it’s really difficult to manage his medical issues long distance.\u00a0 But he now likes Florida, so I’m not sure what he’ll do.<\/p>\n Sorry – no “Friday Fun”<\/em>.\u00a0 But I’m sure you agree that there are priorities, and family is at the top.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As I’m pretty sure I mentioned, my brother was admitted last Friday the 13th for the FOURTH TIME since our Mom’s funeral on 2\/13\/18. He has a multitude of problems, but the big ones have been pneumonia and profound anemia.\u00a0 This time he has bilateral pneumonia (he’s been a smoker since his late teens and […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32170\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}