More news on dad

Today made for yet another long, exhausting day.  I feel like a mac truck ran me over!!  Here is an update on my dad and again bear with me as I try to remember it all….

The neurologist they called in choose to not do an MRI,  because my dad told him all that droopy-ness and loss of strength was “old”.  NOT!!!  I could just smack him.  The side his last stroke effect was his LEFT side, not his right side!!!  That man I swear!  (He lies so much to these doctors just to get out of the hospital).

So the Neurologist decided to have them do a carotid ultrasound, and by the time I got to the hospital they still had not done the Swallow Study Test.  Finally about 12:30 they came for my dad to do the tests.  First was the ultrasound, then it was the other.  Won’t have results of the ultrasound until tomorrow.

Swallow Study Test– my dad now has to have all meat “grounded” before he can eat.  Ground beef like hamburger(s) is fine.  But no more pot roast, pork chops, beef (stew chunks), ham unless I ground first.  If the pot roast is too “stringy” he isn’t allowed to have it all.  Part of this is because of the lack of teeth he has, he can’t tear and shred like he should had have a full set of teeth.  Unfortunately we can’t afford to buy him dentures or can he, medicare doesn’t cover it and medicaid won’t help either, we already tried.   No more lettuce or tomatoes and no grapes!  The list seems to grow as time goes.  So basically soft foods for dad for now on.  He isn’t too thrilled about me using a food processor to grind up the meat a little before he eats it either, to him its like a mother bird chewing for the baby bird.  NO more bacon!  (that is something he has had every Sunday since wow I was a kid!)  But yet he can still have bread and peanut butter??  Can’t he choke on that too?

Then we got more news.  My dad’s blood has bacteria in it (growing) and they don’t know where it is coming from.  We knew the white blood cell count was high and something was off but blood cultures showed bacteria.  What kind or what it is we don’t know yet.  Dad wanted to come home the doctor told him he can’t, if she let him come home with the bacteria in his blood he would drop dead.  So she called in an infectious disease specialist who is now going to have a CT Scan of my dads lungs done tomorrow to see if maybe particles of food from my dad choking over time and got into the lungs and that is where the bacteria is coming from.  If the CT scan comes back clear then well until they find what the cause is, they won’t let him come home.

I wonder how this is effecting his heart?

I know today as we were waiting for him to have his testing done, there was an older gentleman getting ready to go back to a nursing home as he was waiting on an ambulance to come for him, must of been in his 90′s and was humming  Just A Closer Walk With Thee, bless his heart….. and well when he left my dad said he hoped he didn’t live that long to end up like that, I said well one day you just might have to go into a nursing home dad, and he told me no, just quit feeding me, I won’t know the difference and it was all I could to not cry.  As he progressively gets worse there will come a point where he will need more care than I will be able to give and its going to break my heart because I won’t just leave him here and not feed him!  But that is how he is talking now.  So not like him!  (by the way, this was before we found out about his blood having bacteria in it)