As I wrote in my previous caregiving column, the hurdles that come with caregiving for both the caregiver and the person receiving care are what they are, and one has to pray that they can be successfully jumped for a variety of reasons, with the most important one, of course, being to live on to see another day.
One unexpected hurdle my mom and I encountered in July was a cellulitis issue on one of her legs that just came out of nowhere. In my last piece, I noted we weren’t seeing much of a difference with the antibiotic she’d been put on, so we went to another doctor and they gave her a new one. As far as I can tell, it looks better but it’s being stubborn, so another follow-up visit will happen next week to see if we’re on the right track.
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While going through this, Mom also had two other appointments as part of her post-chemo follow-up. CT scans one day and then a couple of days later, a visit with her medical oncologist to do labwork and to also go over the scan results.
I’m very pleased to report that the scans were stable and the doctor was pleased with them. As far as the labwork went, the CEA number – which is what doctors consider a “tumor marker” (though “not a perfect test,” per the doc) – was low, which was also good news.
While we are certainly feeling blessed after hearing that news, I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up some hurdles we encountered during the visit for the CT scans – because in the aftermath they caused me to see the whole hurdle thing in a different light.
Because it was so hot outside and I wanted to give mom’s leg a rest, we opted to use the hospital-provided wheelchair for her that day. Normally we use a transport chair, which is easily loaded in the car and works for those places where the walk may be too far and taxing on mom. But on this day, the hospital wheelchair was available, so we took the opportunity to use it.
Wheelchairs and transport chairs are a lot different from each other, with one of the biggest differences being their weight and width. We had like the Daddy Mack of wheelchairs, which I thought would work out great for Mom and me.
Nope! Of course, a bright idea I had was a failure, of course it was!
The thing was so wide it could barely fit through the handicap bathroom restroom stall door opening, and trust me when I say there was a fair amount of grunting and powerlifting (and internal cursing) going on to get that chair to maneuver the way we needed it to.
At another point when mom needed to go again thanks to the raspberry concoction they gave her for the scans, the main handicapped restroom was occupied and it looked like that was going to take a while, so we had to find another one.
We were advised to go to the one by the hospital gift shop, which was a short walk–and which got us away from the crowd in the visitors’ area, where there was so much coughing going on, it was making me nervous.
As it turns out, the gift shop restroom was a tiny, two-stall restroom but the handicap stall wasn’t a handicap stall at all. The only thing that technically made it handicap-accessible were the bars on either side of the stall for lifting. The seat itself was low and the wheelchair was too wide this time around to get it even remotely close to the stall door in the small bathroom.
I was fuming, because when someone’s gotta go to the bathroom and they already have mobility issues on top of everything else, timing is of the essence. Fortunately, business was able to be done but I had to physically lift her to get her back in the chair because those bars were useless.
After we left from getting the scans done, I grumbled that we’d never use the hospital wheelchair again unless we were just desperate, and that I was going to be that person by pointing out on the hospital satisfaction survey exactly what I thought of that gift shop restroom.
Once we had a chance to catch our breath later that evening, Mom and I were chatting about the day’s events for a little bit and as always, she made a good point, one that I had not previously considered.
“Sometimes you’ve just gotta go with the flow,” she casually remarked. It was an offhand comment, but it made me reconsider how I reacted to the challenges from earlier in the day.
I was thankful to have the hospital wheelchair, but it just didn’t work out for us. Wasn’t really a big deal in the scheme of things. And while the gift shop bathroom was indeed an issue that the hospital needed to be made aware of, when all was said and done we made it work, just like we always do.
“Sometimes you’ve just gotta go with the flow.” I need to plaster that saying in every room of the house (and in the car), so I can remember it when small, seemingly inconsequential problems present themselves. Thanks, Mom (again), for simplifying what your daughter always manages to (unnecessarily) complicate.
SEE ALSO: To read my previous Caregiver’s Diary entries, please click here.