Friday, March 11, 2005
My Grandpa
I haven't been talking about what's going on with my grandfather, but it isn't looking good. First off, he's an age-onset insulin-dependent diabetic for about 20 years now, 83 years old (he'll be 84 in August).
Well, he's been talking about going into a nursing home/assisted living for about a year now, because he's had tons of nerve pain related to the diabetes, and just has started to go downhill. He's been on steroids, and the times I've seen him in the past several years, I've noticed its effects on him behaviorally.
Well, about two weeks ago now, he thought he was having a heart attack and went to his doctor. They said, yep, you've had a massive coronary -- which hospital would you like to go to? He chose Spartanburg, which has a top notch cardiac unit. Well, once they got there, they told him he hadn't had any type of heart attack, but were going to keep him and do an angiogram just to see how his heart is. Well, here's where it all goes downhill.
Apparently, when he went into the cath lab, he went ballistic and pulled out all of his tubes and was belligerent. This continued for several days, with him having brief periods of lucidity. They were talking stroke (thought the CT scan came back clear), sudden onset dementia (is this even possible??), etc., and were actually talking about committing him to the psychiatric ward! Well, my dad went up, and he and his sister who came down from NJ noticed that his blood sugar during one of these episodes was in the mid-300s!! They notified the staff, and after 30 minutes, noone had come yet to administer the insulin. THEN, they went out to bring his nurse in by hand, and she was "out to lunch"!! Can you believe that?? So, they signed out AMA without knowing what was going on, and were going to be testing his blood sugar levels every two hours.
So, now noone wants to trust a nursing home to keep his sugars under control, his wife can't be his sole caretaker anymore as she's also old and has a broken clavicle right now, and they STILL don't know what caused his massive chest pains. I'm sad knowing that it is likely that the end is near -- many of his siblings have passed on in recent years, especially the men.
------------------------------------------------