Yesterday the Palmetto Baptist social worker (or in any case Dad's social worker) Rachel called me saying that he is ready to move on to a nursing home for rehabilitation. The way she phrased it ("Medicare will pay for nursing home care") suggests that his Medicare coverage for hospital care is running out.
Sunday had been so great that we figured that we were past every crisis, and rehab could proceed smoothly. It wasn't so much that yesterday was awful. He was just so incredibly tired all day. The speech pathologist tried to feed him lunch but he was pretty much falling asleep chewing. He eventually choked on the food in his mouth and didn't want to eat anymore. She tried to get him working on tongue exercises, but he fell asleep doing that, too.
Cardell the nursing tech said that he had given Dad a bath and maybe that tuckered him out. Also it was day 7 of Dad's three times a week dialysis schedule. We were hoping that would be the best day (two days off of dialysis) but it didn't turn out that way. By evening, he ate his supper (with help from Malcolm) pretty normally, and he watched part of the ballgame. But generally he was still pretty sleepy.
A doctor had come around in the afternoon. He turned out to be the head of internal medicine for the hospital (Dr. Emmer); he suggested that they had been planning to move Dad out of the IICU today. However, since he wasn't doing too well, this idea was shelved, and Dr. Emmer said he would keep poking around trying to find an explanation for this puzzling exhaustion. I never heard anything else from him, however.
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