My Experience with "Coming Home" Day!

You are thinking that everything is all set, you are ready, the day has arrived and your loved one is coming home. You have no idea of the flurry and hub blub that is about to take place in your home, and all in a very short time, I know I wasn't! My mom was coming home. Home from a nursing home. Recently paralzyed from a brain stem stroke that also took away her speaking and eating abilities, mom was coming home under Hospice Home Health Care. I chose the largest bedroom for her and had it emptied out completely.
The medical equipment arrived all at the same time. I had one man explaining and demonstrating the air mattress while another did the same with the hospital bed. In between those, there was a lady demonstrating the enteral tube feeding pump and how to use it. Standing in line behind those folks was the oxygen machine guy, awaiting his chance to pitch in with his demo! Ok. Needless to say, I lost it! I was almost moved to tears, ready to throw my arms up and quit - but I didn't. I slightly raised my voice and addressed all of them at the same time with a simple " Please, folks, we are going to have to have these demos one by one." "There will be questions that I have that my husband will not think to ask about this medical equipment, so in order to avoid repetition, let's do one at a time and we can both learn and ask!" If it irritated the workers for me to request that, oh well, they should have arrived earlier and allowed for enough time to teach the use of their equipment.
Once the room was all completely setup, there was not as much room left as I had hoped for. I didn't realize how much space the equipment would require. A bit more arranging and I had it pretty much ready for mom's arrival. I rode home with her in the stretcher service van we hired and had my sons waiting here at home to help with getting her inside and transferred to the bed. That done, I began trying my hand out at connecting up the oxygen and the feeding pump. The oxygen was a breeze (excuse my pun) but the feeding pump a challenge. A Hospice worker was here to help but we seemed to have a new pump that she was not familiar with. After a long series of calls to the medical equipment provider and their tech support lines, the pump was finally connected.
A quick time later, everyone was gone and it was just me, my husband and my mom left here. Mom was looking very happy to be back home and I was happy to have her back! I wish I could say that that's how the rest of the day went, but it isn't! The pump malfunctioned and began giving her too much feeding formula. Her catheter started leaking and I didn't know the first thing about how to fix either of these. It was also time to give her meds thru the tube port on the feeding tube and I was terrified. Luckily, the Hospice nurse did return and was able to get the pump and the catheter fixed. While she was here, I had her to observe as I administered the meds for Mom, and that took care of that.
My first time at changing mom did not go all that well either. We had the air mattress which also makes things a little harder. I thought I knew how to do a changing but found out real soon that things are not always as they seem! With my husband on the receiving side and myself on the other, I raised her over on one side while he held her there. We used a drawsheet which was in this case, a large flannel bedpad. After a bit of refolding and arranging, I got the bottom pad laid out, the plastic blue pad on top of that one, and managed to push the old ones under her, along with the ends of the new fresh set. We then lowered her flat and repeated the procedure from the other side, pulling out the old ones and then pulling the ends of the new ones made everything go in place and the change was completed! This operation will get much more smoother with practice so do not worry! You will also find that if things aren't exactly straight, that that is ok also, just keep the wrinkles out. Wrinkles are one of the many things that can cause bedsores. Mom arrived home with 2 large bedsores and that will be subject of discussion here soon.
The night did not go well. The pump malfunctioned again and Hospice told us over the phone to just leave it off overnight. That was very depressing to me for the missed feeding cannot be made up when you are already on a 24 hr. limited feed schedule. I was afraid to go to sleep because I didn't know if I would waken in time to turn her in just two hours. My husband stayed up and we took turns all night, the only problem was that it took both of us to do the turns so we both had to get up every two hours. By morning, I was wondering how we were ever going to hold up without sleep! Thankfully, after a while, we realized that the air mattress did indeed do a wonderful job and that the two hour turns were not a requirement after all. We reduced the turns to every three hours during the day, last thing before bed, and right away upon waking. This worked for us and there were no more bedsores caused from not being turned.
This wraps up the "Comming Home" Day for us. You will find it very exciting, very tiring, and perhaps discouraging also, but you will also find it well worth all of your efforts. We did!