Friday 20 May

The first things that was clear on Friday morning was that the heater was not going on, likely a blown pilot light. The house was really cold. Dad is the only one in the family who has ever relit the pilot and while he was willing to go down and do it the rest of us said not this time and a call was put in to PGandE.

 Friday morning was early appointments for Gramps at San Bruno Veterans Affairs Clinic and Linda and I were going with him. The wind was still howling and it was pretty cold so we did out best to get gramps in and out of the car without too much exposure. Although he says he is feeling really good no one wants to take a chance. Two years ago during one of my visits  I went with gramps and Linda to a doctor's appt here and they took one look at him and called the paramedics, put him in an ambulance and sent him to hospital. Luckily that did not happen today. 

He sees a number of people here but the main ones today were Dawn and Anna and Social Worker Paul. The staff are all wonderful with Dad and very respectful Of his ages do admiring of his acumen. He got a lot of happy responses and congratulations for being so much improved. 

They wanted to know everything that had happened since leaving the hospital. LInda asked me to cover the hospice experience and regarding medication routines and changes gramps did most of the talking. The number of medications he was taking before hospital and in hospital is way reduced, has grown from 9 to 4 and he has taken no medication for diabetes since coming home. All the recommendations were to let things stabilise on the reduced meds regime. Jane in particular was strongly of the view that less medication would allow him to recover faster. His improvement ads strength to that view. 

The VA staff were intrigued and impressed with how things had gone, but they felt it was time now to introduce diabetes medication so he is to use slow acting insulin once a day before bed time and they were quite clear that they were recommending this as a permanent thing. 

We had lots of talks about the oxygen, this has been a new development to come home with oxygen and gramps is not clear if this too will be a forever thing or if he will need it less as he gets better. So we had a lot of,conversation around that but I think it is a wait and see thing still. But while we had brought a tank with us in the car we had not brought it in with us and he was fine without it right through the appointments.