Field Notes from a Medicare Disaster: Fourteen

As the days and weeks went by, my guy made slow-- achingly slow-- progress. Context is everything:  he'd arrived at Providence unable to even turn himself in his bed, so it was great progress when he got to his feet in the gym (okay, yes there were two physios on either side of him, and he was holding on to a walker with white knuckles, but still).  It was also progress when, with the aid of what is called a saskapole, he was able to pull himself on and off his bed and into and out of a wheelchair using his own muscle power instead of the Hoyer (something he began to do not long after they stopped the laxatives he didn't need and the blood pressure drug that made him dizzy). When the saskapole was first put up in his room, at his insistence, but against the better judgement of his physiotherapist, he got cocky and tried to use it without a helper: he ended up sliding to the ground like a talent-free pole dancer while his roommate pressed the help button.

Gradually, he began to take over more of his own care, shaving himself, washing himself in the shower, achievements proudly reported by his nurses (he put on his socks today!) who were great cheerleaders. But there was no hiding where everyone at Providence thought he would get to in the long run: the occupational therapist wanted us to order a wheelchair designed just for him because that was his future. What else to expect with the diagnosis of a neurodegenerative disease?  There could only be regression. He would never be as able as he'd been before he got the flu when he'd climbed up and down the stairs several times a day, and did it more easily than walking. They wanted to teach him how to "walk" in a wheelchair using his heels and legs to pull himself along, rather than his arms. The lead physiotherapist had a theory that relying on his strong upper body was a mistake, that he should work hard to rebuild his legs. And this turned out to be the correct strategy, as you will see, though the results would surprise her. I measured the door openings at home to make sure the bathroom reno would permit a wheelchair or commode chair to roll in and out and ordered two stair-lifts, one to an outside door, one to the second floor, because, so far as the physiotherapist and the occupational therapist were concerned, there was no way in hell he'd be able to climb or descend our stairs again. It was suggested that we might need a saskapole by the bed and in the bathroom too.

In other words, as a friend of mine who died young from a medical error used to say: situation bleak.

And yet: as I ran around doing the things that needed doing I refused to dwell on bleak. The fact is I didn't really believe the diagnosis and so I didn't really believe the prognosis either. But truth is more than facts. The truth is I could not get my head around the notion that he would not improve. And neither could he. We have both spent our lives doggedly working at difficult problems until we conquered them or failed with honor. The belief in the inevitability of progress through hard work is a habit of mind rooted deep in both our childhoods. ("Just put your head down and bull your way through," my Dad used to say. "If at first you don't succeed, try, try and try again," his Mom used to say.) We could not just shake off our belief in that belief. and besides; he was improving daily, if only in tiny increments. There were good days and bad. First he had a good day followed by a bad. Then he had two good days followed by a bad. We thought he could do stairs again, that he would do stairs again if they would just let him try. But they didn't want him to try, not without big people standing by. We didn't see the virtue of building the legs and letting the arms go to rack and ruin: we asked if he could do weights. No, they didn't want him doing that either.

We were directed instead to practice using the wheelchair, and later, getting in and out of a stairlift.  Providence has a small stairlift set up on a short staircase in a big room on the basement level of the main building. He practiced getting out of the wheelchair, using a walker, and then getting himself on and off the stairlift. It went well. He smiled and waved like the Queen as he sailed up and down again.

One day, the wheelchair people brought in a snazzy one for him to try, much lighter than the generic wheelchair he'd been using, with cushioning designed specifically for him. I had to learn how to disassemble and reassemble it in order to get it in and out of a car. But at least I could lift it. Standard wheelchairs are very heavy. The company that would actually supply it, with a government subsidy of 85% of its cost if the Local Health Integration Network officials approved (not a forgone conclusion as I would discover), is also a listed supplier of other needs like handholds to screw into door frames, like commode chairs that can roll right into and out of a shower, like a saskapole. Each for a price. A hefty price. The wheelchair, even with the subsidy, had a really hefty price. People who have no money do the same thing with these devices that they do with prescriptions for medications they cannot afford: they don't order them. The medical aid business is growing almost as fast as funeral homes what with baby boomers learning first hand that aging is not for the faint of heart and that death, unlike taxes, actually is inevitable. (Taxes, as the rich know, can be avoided by means of incorporated shell companies in tax havens where the sun always shines.)

About two and a half weeks after he was admitted to Providence, the social worker on his floor made an appointment to discuss his discharge date. They wanted him out by the 23rd of March, one month after he was admitted. That discharge date had been on the weekly schedule set out on his bedside table as soon as he arrived, long before anyone knew what his rate of recovery might be. Apparently, they intended to stick to it come hell or high water. I explained that the bathroom reno might take more time, and he couldn't come home if he had no bathroom. Similarly, we had to wait for the stairlift which had not yet arrived from Britain. Also, I told her I wasn't sure how I was going to manage even with the finished bathroom and a stairlift. He needed help with everything from getting to the bathroom to dressing to getting to bed. While I could screw handholds to door frames so he could haul himself where he needed to go, there were no young nursing students available at our house to lend a hand when needed. I work, I explained. I cannot be a full-time nurse.

I wasn't to worry about that, she said, help would be made available through the Local Integrated Health Network. But not for more than 45 minutes a day if my mother's experience was any guide, I said. I  begged for at least another week past the original discharge date. I had no idea that begging was not necessary: I could have simply refused that date and refused any transfer to another facility, and they would have had to accommodate us, as the story below makes clear. I explained to the social worker that a film crew was coming to shoot a film on him at the end of the month, so would it okay if they shot it at Providence ?

They had never had such a request before, permission had to be sought, she said. The care coordinator seemed particularly pleased at the prospect.

In the meantime, roommate John was going home on weekends, although his blood pressure was being driven up by stress at home. We heard all about the problems of his life, just as he heard all about ours. One day I arrived to find his wife very upset. She was an admirable woman in many ways, not least because her fingernails were always perfect in spite of the hard work she did all day. She wore her hair in a ponytail and dressed in oversized sweatshirts as if in her own mind she was still a lithe teenager hanging out with friends after class. She was feisty. She was kind. She was smart. She was running herself into the ground trying to take care of everything and everyone she cared about. She said John was going to be moved to another room down the hall, a three bed room. He was unhappy about it. I was unhappy to hear it. He and my guy had each other's backs, for one thing. Our families enjoyed each other's company for another.

Why? I asked

A man with insurance entitling him to a two bed room is getting this bed, said his wife.

But we don't have insurance either, I said.

A rebellious/defeated look flashed across her face. It said, without words, that the haves are always treated better than the have-nots in our everyone-is-equal medicare system, and that she and John are have-nots. When John got back from physio he said that if he didn't like the new room, he'd just go home and not come back.

A few nights after John moved, my guy was awakened by a bedlam of grown men bellowing at each other.  Apparently John had come in late and turned on his bed light which disturbed the man in the bed next to him, a man who had been in that bed for no less than two years, a man who steadfastly refused to be discharged from Providence and gave new meaning to the word difficult. When I stuck my head in to see how John was doing the next day I found him in a dark and crowded space. He said he was doing fine. I said I'd heard he'd been in a fight. He grinned and said he liked a fight. Not good for the blood pressure, I said. Yeah sure, he said. Did I know the long wait for help between 4 and 11 p.m. was happening again? He couldn't understand why. The fix was so simple and wouldn't cost Providence a nickle. They just needed to bring on a second shift of nursing students between 4 and 11. Nursing students must do rotations in hospitals as part of their course work. There were more than enough students to go around.

Brilliant, I said, I'll go and suggest it to the care coordinator.

So I hunted down the care coordinator and gave her John's suggestion.

Great minds think alike, she said, we've just started to move on that. Would you like to be on a community advisory committee?

I don't live in this community, I said, and besides, it was John's idea. Why don't you invite him?

Her blank face made it clear she had no interest in John at all. I'll think about that, she said.

She may have thought, but so far as I know, she did not invite.

I arrived one morning to find the new roommate on John's former side of the room, a man in his early fifties. Call him Tom. He was sitting in a wheelchair beside his bed, staring at nothing. His TV was not turned on: it was broken and no one had come to fix it. He had no reading material. He had spectacular tats that run up and down both arms and across his chest, the kind seen on made members of the Russian Mafiya. As he was wearing basketball shorts and a sleeveless shirt they were on full display. I wanted to ask him about them and about his life in general but he'd had a stroke that was so bad he could not speak. He could barely swallow: the speech language pathology people kept bringing him jellied liquids instead of water to drink, though his lunch tray had had things on it that he shouldn't have had. When his meals came, he choked, and choked, and choked, sending me running down the hall repeatedly to find a nurse to clear his airway. As we would learn, he had been in this state for months, first at another rehab hospital, then at home. He'd spent most of the last year on a bed set up in the family room.

I didn't see any of his family for some days. I wondered, at first, if he had one.

Then his wife appeared one afternoon with his mother. Their problems made ours look small. First, they don't live in Toronto but in a smaller town east of the city. Tom's wife looked significantly older than her years. Short, spikey hair, makeup to hide exhausted eyes or at least to avert attention from them, a tad overweight, desk-bound overweight. As long as she was in the room she never stopped fussing over him: he hadn't shaved, hadn't had a shower, she determined these things asking him yes or no questions which he answered by affirmative or negative nods. She spoke in a loud voice, an irritated voice which I recognized because the same voice kept emerging from my own mouth whenever I came in and found my guy in bed, or his physio cancelled. She had found Tom in need of changing so she went charging down the hall looking for his nurse. I'd grown less angry about that sort of thing, mainly because it happened less frequently than when my guy was first admitted. But Tom was new to Providence and she'd been managing his care to her own high standard at home for almost a year in spite of the fact that she also had a full time job as an investigator. She'd had their family room wired with video cameras so she could check on him from her desk at work.

Her husband, she explained when she came back, had been an undercover cop for years, on a drugs and gangs beat, which is why he had those tats, and probably why he'd had the stroke, it was all those years of unbelievable stress, of living a lie every day and wondering when the people he was setting up to be arrested would figure that out and kill him.

His mother, a sweet woman with a June Cleaver face told me later, while Tom was off in the gym, that Tom had been athletic all his life, played every sport there is, and that after his stroke made it impossible for him to walk, let alone run, he'd just cried, and cried. You mean he felt defeated? I asked. I could see that some days he refused physio and just stared at the TV. Yet as the days went by, the physiotherapists helped him get better control of his body and the speech language pathologist taught him how to control his breathing so he could utter a few words.  Though his choking continued, the nurses taught him how to make it stop on his own.

As I watched his progress I began to think Providence was living up to its name.

 I arrived at Providence at 8:30 in the morning to take my guy to his appointment with the neurologist  at Michael Garron Hospital. His day nurse, a tiny woman who was fiercely attentive to her patients' needs, who did everything she could to make things go smoothly for them, had put him at the top of the shower list. Though I arrived early, he was ready to go.

I haven't said enough about the nurses at Providence, both male and female. There was a terrific male nurse who had been a doctor before he immigrated to Canada from Albania in order to better the lives of his children. He'd figured it was faster for him to get certified in Canada as an RN than to redo medical school and wait in line for a residency. So he had sacrificed himself, and yet he was not bitter. His children were doing very well at school, thank you. He made it his business to buck up the spirits of his patients whenever he could, especially the men who were so downhearted at the loss of their strength. When my guy pulled himself along in the wheelchair in the hall, he'd praise the smallest improvement. Then there was the tiny Philipina who had two children at home, but worked most days without stopping to sit down for lunch, worked until her skin took on a grey tinge from exhaustion, then went home and worked some more. And how about the woman from the Caribbean, tall, slim, who handled my guy without breaking a sweat, always with a kind word, always encouraging. And there were so many students who came, in their burgundy uniforms, from everywhere on earth, earnest young men from Pakistan, young women from Brazil, from Somalia, from Ethiopia, some wearing hijabs, some with their hair swinging free, all with that inner glow that comes from helping others, that comes from knowing you can. It's a noble calling, one of them said. I coudln't remember the last time anyone I knew used the word "noble" in conversation.

We went downstairs and out into the brisk morning air to wait for the wheelchair taxi which arrived exactly on time. The driver rolled him in his wheelchair through the van's back door, fastened his chair to the floor, and off we went.

The neurologist' s office was off a dark hall lined with patients filling all available chairs. The neurologist kept us waiting long past the appointment time, but I didn't worry because I had brought a Sinamet with me in case we had to wait past the time when he was supposed to take it.

The neurologist was a tall, lanky man in his middle forties. He made it clear right from the start that he would not be taking on my guy's case. I don't do Parkinson's, he said. But  perhaps we could tell him what had been going on?

We raced through the issues, explained that we'd had a problem with the neurologist assigned by St. Mike's, and gave him the whole story as quickly as we could.

Would you let me examine you, he asked.

That's why we're here, said my guy.

Carefully, slowly, he went through the same physical tests done by the neurological resident at St. Mike's which had produced a diagnosis of Parkinsonian syndrome.

"Well," he said. " I don't think it's Parkinson's or anything like it."

That's what the very first neurologist said, I said. He'd ruled it out. And the doctor at Providence said the same thing.  But if it isn't Parkinsonian syndrome, what is it?

"I have no idea," he said.

Well would you take me on, my guy asked. I like you.

No, he said.

Something made me wonder if he had tangled with our former neurologist, or had some fundamental disagreement with the way neurology is managed at St. Mike's

Would you care to comment on the fact that a resident made this diagnosis and the neurologist we were assigned is an epilepsy specialist?

No, he said.

Is this about medical politics? I asked.

I can't comment on that, he said.

Which was of course a non denial denial and in my world, the equivalent of a yes.

Well, what should we do? My guy asked.

I think we should do a test while you're at Providence with nurses and doctors to help you, where you're safe, he said.  I want to run an experiment.  Let's stop the Sinamet and see what happens. If you get worse, the original diagnosis might be correct.  If you don't, well....

You mean stop the pills right now?

That's right, he said.

Twenty four hours later I came to his room to find him sitting up in his chair with his ankle over his knee, the way he used to sit, but which he hadn't done for months and months. His voice was stronger, more his normal register. And there was something else, a brightness to him that I hadn't seen for a long time.

You're feeling better, I said.

Right, he said, with a grin.

When Daughter Number One came in she was astonished.

His voice, she said, the way he's sitting, the way he's talking, it's like Dad's back.

Exactly.