ONE LAST RIDE

Last Monday April 7^th was a day to remember.

It started the Friday before, when Joanne, a staff member of the nursing home my mom was living in gave my sister a manila folder filled with papers for the coming release of mom on Monday, April 7^th. In it was a phone number for an ambulette service to transport mom to her home. Mom was not making any more progress and all her therapy was over, she was unhappy and missing her home, and wanted desperately to go home to die. Joanne decided to help us make all the arrangements for mom to go home and fulfill her wish.

One Saturday, the next day, my sister called me and asked me to see if I could find the folder, since she didn’t have it. Being at mom’s house waiting for a delivery of a hospital bed, I was but a few minutes from the nursing home. I sneak into mom’s room while she is asleep and look in all the drawers and closet in her room and can’t find the folder. I leave without waking mom and call my sister and tell her I can’t find it, even after asking at the nurse’s station.

Ambulette

The rest of Saturday was spent calling ambulette companies to see if they had scheduled anybody with my mother’s name to be transported on the 7^th. No one had, and so I figured I better ask some questions. The one company name we could remember as the one we were told would transport her was very cooperative and answered my questions. It came down to this: an ambulette only transports people in a wheel chair, not flat like an ambulance, they also do not carry people up steps. Had we ordered an ambulette, they would have put mom in a chair, in great pain she would have been jostled all the way home, and left her at the foot of the steps for my sister and I to find a way to get up her up the steps and into her bedroom.

Ambulance

Monday morning Joanne comes into mom’s room and asks if we are all set. I say we are except for transportation, and that we need an ambulance, not an ambulette. Joanne asks me who says? I state that she can’t sit in a wheelchair, and since she can’t walk, how can we carry her up the three steps she has? Joanne goes out of the room embarrassed stating it will be very expensive for an ambulance and asks the nurses if it is true mom can’t sit in a wheelchair, they confirm my opinion and off she goes to find an ambulance, coming back after a few minutes with the news that an ambulance would come in around noon, and that Medicare would pay for it! Had we NOT lost the folder we would have been sitting there at the foot of the front steps with mom in severe pain from the ride in a wheelchair and us unable to move her into her own home! The ambulance crew put her in a gurney and transported her up the steps and placed her in her bed.

Tomorrow: The long ride.