Endoscopy

    This was going to be pretty nearly totally upbeat, but events have caused me to have to add a coda which is almost totally TMI. I'll add a few empty lines before it so you can bail if you want to.
    Dad was feeling a lot better, which is to say that his chronic burping problem was improving. However, he had his appointment with the gastroenterologist for an endoscopy yesterday, and decided to go through with it since he has been having trouble with his stomach for years and he'd like to know what is going on.
    Apart from the hour wait to be sent back to the endoscopy clinic and the additional half-hour wait for the actual procedure, it went totally great. We had asked for him not to be sedated, because he has quite enough trouble with his balance without sedation, and previous experience with anesthetics suggest that they hit him harder than other people. The tech setting him up strongly recommended sedation, but when we talked to the anesthesiologist he said that he could numb Dad's throat and they could hold off sedation unless he really needed it.
    As it turned out, he had no problems. He has no recollection of the anesthesiologist doing anything about numbing his throat, and in fact his throat wasn't in any way numb. But the procedure was quick and painless. The anesthesiologist had warned him that he couldn't eat or drink for another 2 hours because of the numbness (which would have been unpleasant since he had already gone 8 or 9 hours without at that point) but when Dad said his throat wasn't numb, the anesthesiologist said he'd leave it up to Dad.
    This morning, Dad called saying that he had had a rough night with gas, that he'd called the gastroenterologist and that the latter wanted to talk to me. I thought this was some kind of major crisis, but it turned out that the doctor was just trying to tell Dad that this was to be expected. The doctor is from India I think, and though he doesn't have a lot of accent, he tends both to mutter and to talk fast, neither of which work well with Dad's limited hearing. So it turned out to be a storm in a teacup, no emergency room trip needed, and an almost totally happy ending. Until...



    I took Dad to dialysis, got home and got most of lunch eaten, when Margaret called saying that Dialysis had called and Dad had failed to make it to the bathroom and needed a complete change of clothes. Margaret put it together and I got to her house and to the clinic ASAP to get it to him. They had left him in an infernally hot men's room wearing only a shirt and a sock. I was starting on his shoes (the only item I didn't have a change for) when a staffer came to help. She did all the really heavy lifting on cleaning him up. Still, it took almost an hour.
    She asked if he had home health care for this, and I told her that I had left a message with the facility's social worker asking for a referral. She said Dad's kidney doctor (also affiliated with the facility) could give us one. Hopefully the experience will help that process along. I told her in all sincerity that she was an angel, a pro and my hero, and how often can you do that?