Well, folks, here’s another page-turner on what the elderly have to deal with and on what the caregivers have to put up with. The usual nuttiness prevails: let’s just say it all began with my mother’s need for a new commode. If you’ve never seen one, you are  lucky because you likely don’t need one. [See the photo above.]

At least a month ago, maybe two, my mother announced that she needed a new commode. (The one she has been using was in her apartment in Florida and belonged to someone else, someone who left and maybe even died. It got moved here with her stuff.) So OK, that info went into my memory bank and I was reminded a few times by the aide. Her message was: MEDICAID pays for it. This aide takes care of my mother five days a week and when she goes home she has to take care of a family AND a father with Alzheimer’s. Picture that.

So, I contacted my mother’s Medicaid Long Term Care person and requested “a commode.”

But it isn’t that easy: A request doesn’t do it, a doctor’s prescription does. Supposedly. So I requested a prescription from the doctor’s nurse in the medical office which is in my mother’s building.

However—and you just knew there’d be a catch, it seems that a prescription for a Medicaid vendor wasn’t enough; there has to be a letter of necessity and “progress notes.” What do you suppose goes into “progress notes for a soon-to-be 102 year old woman? Well, I can tell you, the relic that is currently in her bathroom is rusting out, it ruined the toilet seat, it is missing a rubber foot and it tilts making voiding one’s innards comparable to riding a bucking bronco, to the point where  this “old horse” caused my mother to sit, lose her balance and throw her head backwards into some shelves which reside there. How’s that for progress?

Trust me, I observed this nonsense of an apparatus last week; the aide and I tried to shim it up with squashed toilet paper cores—to no avail.

And then, the care manager says, “wait! you don’t need to go through Medicaid! Just have the nurse send the prescription to the corner pharmacy and her Medicare should take care of it without a letter of need and progress notes!”

So, that’s what I did. I called the nurse again and asked her to fax the prescription to the corner pharmacy, after calling the pharmacist and being assured that he could handle this.

Days passed and melded into weeks. I called the entire cast of characters over and over making myself into the biggest pain and then, then, the pharmacist says, he CANNOT handle this order.

Now you tell me? And what if I hadn’t called?

I emailed/called the Medicaid care manager again after numerous emails asking for help. She seemed to have forgotten that she is the one who told me to go through Medicare, but she was now clueless as to what was going on and asked why she hasn’t received the letter and notes from the doctor. As she is the nicest care manager we’ve had from the bunch I do not want to start anything that might lead to an altercation. I got back on the phone and asked the poor nurse to PLEASE send a letter and the progress notes to the Medicaid care manager. Gratefully and luckily we both tried to laugh about this nonsense in disbelief because anger gets you nowhere. (Just like with politics). But, I am thinking, come on, come on people, you are taking care of the elderly who are as good as dead without an advocate.

I gave the nurse some time to work with the doctor again and to prepare the notes and letter.

[I just want to insert here that in all the years my mother has been at this residence, the medical office’s fax has not been able to receive my faxes (truly a mystery!) and I have had to use the fax in another of their offices and hope that the worker there would bring the fax to the correct place. This failed to take place three times last week when I tried to contact the office and send a photo of my mother’s new health card.]

OK, so back to this insanity! I emailed the care manager and got a response: “I am working on it.”

Huzzah!

Mind you, I was at the point where I was just going to throw my hands up and BUY a commode myself.

Until then, let us keep fingers crossed that the bucking bronco will behave until the new commode arrives.

This series starts here:
Part 1: And The Band Played On … a mother’s life, a daughter’s journey

The previous post is here

The next post is here.