I'M BAAAACCCCCCKKKKKKK

I am FINALLY back online and I'm Sooooo glad. I was having blog withdrawals for a long time now. It never fails that when I can't get to a computer, crazy things happen.

To update those who may have wondered where I went, my Doctor decided that homehealth care was not the way to heal pressure wounds, especially since I lived along and had to be in my chair to clean house, cook, take care of my cat, and many other things. So, while I was in the hospital last summer, he decided that I needed to be in a nursing home to get "daily wound care" instead of wound care every other day. Plus, I can stay out of my chair here and have others do things for me.

But, I told my parents long ago that I would never put them in a nursing home after all the stories I heard about these places. Now the woman who came to talk to be about coming here and to evaluate whether they could take care of my needs, told me that those stories were far from the truth. I let her know that I'm not the type to be ignored. When I need something taken care of, I will raise cane until it does. She said she didn't have a problem with that.

Well, I've been here since last July, early August, and I'm here to tell you that those horror stories are true. I'm used to hosptials where RNs are the only one's who can dispense medications. Here, LPN's dispense the meds. They have Certified Nursing Assistants that are supposed to be educated. After all, don't they have classes for that??? The CNA's are the ones who do the grunt work, change beds, bathe the "residents", assist the residents with what ever they need. Here though, I wonder at the educational level of some of the CNAs. I've had some who don't know how to take a blood pressure. Some don't know how to work those battery operated thermometers. I actually had one to stand and stare at a urinal for 15 minutes before she figured out how much it measured.

Some of the LPNs are much brighter. The even have one here who suffers from bad eyesight due to diabetes. Can you imagine her passing out meds and giving out the wrong ones? So, they put her to changing my dressings on my pressure wounds. After she was through, she asked me if I saw any more dressings on the table. Mind you, my bedside table is brown. The 4" x 4" dressings she had laid on that table were every easy to see, so, you would think that she could tell that there were none left on the table.

OH, and as far as the wrong meds, I've been given the wrong meds by nurses who could see. But see, I never take anything I don't recognize.

The Wound Nurse thinks she perfect, even though she's only an LPN. She told me one time that one of my wounds had a serious infection, but she never put me on antibiotics or put me on "contact isolation." And I never ran a fever, and I've never known a time when I had an infection in which I never had a fever. Then the type of infection changed from a pre-cursor to gangrene to a pre-cursor to that flesh eating disease, according to her.

The brightest side to this whole thing is that I met a woman who has spinal bifida like I do and we've had similar childhoods and lives. We been together since October 3rd of last year.

Just because I'm here doesn't mean I've stopped paying attention to what's going on in the world. I heard all about the shooting at Virginia Tech. And two others that tried to be copycats.

But I mainly wanted everyone to know I'm back.

Ironsides.