Spirited Heart because I have become a warrior for love and caring on my Mom’s behalf. Believe it or not, it’s not against the law in Minnesota, if you live in a nursing home, to have a doctor change medication without consultation of your medical POA. It’s one of the most frustrating things imaginable, when you, as a caregiver, spend your time deliberating over everything that would be helpful, trying to keep the wheels of everyone’s life turning, and he steps in, scheduled, but uninvited, and makes changes without your knowledge. We had had a good conversation, he added to my understanding, and then this without discussion. I learn it as the nurse phones me about changes to her medications. She has to spend her day helping me find a way to get it anyway and I will have to back track in every system to reinstate medication that’s been valuable to her. It’s not over, the weekend came, and nothing in the nursing home moves ahead on a weekend.
The up side is, her nurse, whom we adore, told me. I didn’t have to wait 6 weeks to learn this same information as I did last year to learn her communicative decline may have been caused by removing her from the medication without my knowledge. Because it’s not in the literature to be beneficial at this stage, because they are asked to cut costs (a whole $11/month), because they don’t know enough about her and didn’t ask.
It remains to be seen if I’ll succeed at getting it back. We are not dealing with life or death today, but quality of life until death. I call on all medical professionals to have more transparency and common courtesy to be on the team with caregivers. Anger and grief are often spiked for numerous reasons but adding to it like this, felt like betrayal.