After Norah got the Broviac placed, we were finally discharged the next day (July 21). We got started with our home health on Wednesday, had to have a dressing change late Friday night (I’ll get to that in a bit), and then a blood draw Tuesday the 28th. When I hadn’t heard from the doctor’s office about lab results Wednesday, I felt a little uneasy. Usually when you don’t hear about blood work it means no news is good news! Right? Wrong. I finally called the doctor’s office Thursday morning and they still hadn’t gotten the results from home health, so they had to request them again.  Low and behold, Thursday afternoon at about 3:30 I got a call that Norah’s sodium was lower than it’s ever been but because the results were from 2 days ago, they wanted a redraw. Well anyone in the medical world knows that you can’t get blood work results back before the end of the business day if you do a blood draw after about 2, even if it’s marked STAT. So there we were, on the other side of town for one of my doctor’s appointments, faced with the inability of a redraw unless we went to the ER. You probably know where this is going…

Sure enough we were admitted to Sunrise again after Norah’s sodium was only 122 (normal range is 134-145). Luckily we met with Dr. Baron’s associate, Dr. Elizabeth Mileti. She was awesome! We really liked her and she was totally on the same page as us as far as decreasing the lasiks and other diuretic as well as starting Norah on lipids to help her gain weight now that we had a Broviac catheter. After a couple of days we were within the range they wanted us for sodium (still not typical, but at least high 120s) and we were cleared to go home on Monday. Unfortunately the doctor that took over on Monday (since Mileti was only there for the weekend) didn’t put the orders in quickly enough and they threatened to have us stay another night until they could figure out the lipids for use at home with home health. To make a long story short, I sincerely cried to the coordinator for our home health equipment agency and said that I just wanted to be home. I told her we had spent more of July in the hospital than out and that Norah wasn’t “getting better.” I told her that Norah didn’t eat very well and was very stressed when we were in the hospital and so I cherished every day that we got to be home and would fight for any opportunity to do so that I could. Not sure whether my tears or the coordinator made things happen, but we were able to go home late Monday evening. Thank God! I cried more tears of happiness!

Ok… backtracking just a tad, we were set up with 1 home health nurse initially on July 22, when he came out that Friday to do the dressing change, let’s just say that he did not follow proper sterile procedure in doing the dressing change. Since we had read and been demonstrated to by the nursing staff in the hospital, I knew that his technique could put Norah in jeopardy of getting infection so I kept questioning him, asking if he could do this or that, and he totally blew me off. Not to mention he sort of made fun of me when he came out initially because I was up in arms about having someone here to do the flush when the doctor’s office kept calling to make sure it would be done by such a time and he was taking his time getting to our home. Anyway… I was not impressed by this particular nurse to say the least, and so we were reassigned to a different nurse. The nurse that came out after we were discharged the last time was so great! I was impressed by her patience, her understanding, her care, and her way with Norah. The nurses that did the next blood draws were great too! I guess there’s always a bad egg in every batch! Just thankful that the original nurse we were assigned will never step foot in my house or touch my daughter ever again. Even Stella didn’t act like she trusted him… and you know how intuitive dogs are about humans. So at the end of the day, we came home, stayed home, and were set to do flushes at least every 24 hours and provide Norah a lipids supplement 4 nights a week to help her gain weight. Success!!