Tonight's picture was taken on May 26 of 2009. We were in Mattie's PICU room at the Hospital. Mind you this wasn't a big room! Yet we blew up a kiddie pool, filled it with some water, and put in inflatable toys and Mattie was on the floor playing. Was this the most hygienic place for him to be? Most likely not! But it was very hard to contain an active seven year old to a chair or bed. At some point he wanted to play on the floor! There would be times, I would lay out bed sheets or blankets on the floor, just so Mattie could sit on them and play, but of course this also was challenging because this was a hospital and in the room were big pieces of equipment. But we worked around these obstacles, as this photo clearly shows! When nurses and doctors walked into Mattie's room, they never knew what they were going to find.... literally!
Quote of the day: In the heart or every caregiver is a knowing that we are all connected. As I do for you, I do for me. ~ Tia Walker
Peter is still home today recovering from a bacterial infection from hell! It has been a rough couple of days here and out of principle, I couldn't let my doctor's office get away with her unethical behavior on Tuesday. Since the office administrator did not call me back like promised to discuss my concern, I got on the phone this morning and called him and left a message. Two hours later he called me back and we had a twenty minute conversation about what had transpired on Tuesday evening. Tuesday was as he called it the "perfect storm." Many things did not align properly for Peter's care, with test results not coming back until 9pm and so forth. But the biggest issue that I had was the medical practice's after hours on-call physician line was NOT working. I repeat was NOT working Tuesday evening. It appeared to work, it accepted messages, yet NO ONE was returning patient messages! Which is highly unusual for this practice. I have used this medical group practice for over 15 years and on-call physicians answer calls within 20 minutes.
Literally on Tuesday evening I paged the on-call doctor at 6pm, 7pm, 8pm, 8:20pm, and then 8:30pm. The next morning, my doctor's nurse called me because I had left a nasty gram on my doctor's personal voice mail line. The nurse had the audacity to tell me that the after hours on-call physician did return calls on Tuesday night, just NOT my calls! Needless to say, that aggravated me because to me that was making a judgment call as to what was deemed important. After talking to the office administrator today, I learned that the nurse was completely incorrect. The phone system wasn't functioning and no calls were answered that night and every patient calling in was complaining, JUST LIKE ME! He understood my frustration with the nurse and agreed that doctors would not triage calls in such an insensitive manner. Of course this points out the flaw in the phone system and how there needs to be back up systems in place so that the phone system NEVER shuts down again and patients are unable to reach a physician. I got all my points across and felt like we are on the same page and my doctor knows now if she promises to call me with results or promises a prescription that day, that no matter the TIME OF DAY, she needs to call me!
However, last year Tim (who is pictured here) and Gavin (who is Carolyn's, our Raffle Walk chair, son) approached me and asked me if this year's Walk could include more hands on Lego activities for kids. Both Tim and Gavin are Lego affectionatos like my Mattie, so I took their feedback VERY SERIOUSLY! They both approached me in a very mature manner and really asked me in a way that wanted what was best for the Walk. Tim, was a classmate of Mattie's in Kindergarten. In fact, a funny story..... when Mattie lost his first tooth, it was in Kindergarten class. How did he lose it? Mattie actually spit the tooth out of his mouth right at Tim! Fortunately Tim handled it better than I would have!
Happiness and busyness under the Legos Tent!
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