It’s been a week since Mary’s trach surgery. Physically, she is still recovering well. Last night and this morning, she woke up without an anxiety attack, kept calm and smiled. Later today though, we had a couple of times where mucus was building up in her trachea, and that caused quite a bit of anxiety until we got it suctioned up.
Last night I interviewed a potential caregiver, and this morning I interviewed another one. I plan to do in-person interviews with both of them, hopefully while Mary is awake, and see how it goes.
This morning, the respiratory therapist had me change the inner cannula myself, and I suctioned out her trach several times today. I’ve been watching like a hawk and asking a ton of questions for the past week, so I was ready to try it. I’ll be taking on more of that care with supervision over the next couple of days since once she’s back home, I’ll need to be doing it.
If things continue to go well, the company that provided Mary’s Trilogy will come out on Monday to change it to a ventilator, then Mary will spend the night on the Trilogy with a 1:1 nurse monitoring it since it can’t be monitored from the nurse’s station. Again, if all goes well, the plan is to take her home on Tuesday.
I’m a little concerned about the caregiver situation still. We still need at least 2 more people, preferably 3, to cover the hours we need for Mary’s care. Her home health nurse is working on some of his connections to see what he can find out, and I’ve made a list of people to cold-call and see if they are interested/available.
I spent some time today getting some of the features set up on Mary’s Tobii: her Facebook and Gmail accounts are set up now. I am still struggling with getting Skype to work without crashing everything, and I need to get her phone synched to text message through the Tobii, but making progress. I also spent several hours going through and cleaning up her gmail inbox, which had over 7000 emails in it when i started working on it a couple of weeks ago. It’s ok if you tell her, I’m following the guidelines she gave me: what to file and where, and what to delete. I’ve got it down to just under 4000 emails now, nearly 2000 of which have never been read (!) Good thing they are mostly mailing list notifications that can be deleted!
I spent some time today getting some of the features set up on Mary’s Tobii: her Facebook and Gmail accounts are set up now. I am still struggling with getting Skype to work without crashing everything, and I need to get her phone synched to text message through the Tobii, but making progress. I also spent several hours going through and cleaning up her gmail inbox, which had over 7000 emails in it when i started working on it a couple of weeks ago. It’s ok if you tell her, I’m following the guidelines she gave me: what to file and where, and what to delete. I’ve got it down to just under 4000 emails now, nearly 2000 of which have never been read (!) Good thing they are mostly mailing list notifications that can be deleted!
Tomorrow we’re expecting a visit from Mary’s brother and sister-in-law, and they may be bringing one of her old friends.