How the 2009 Vacation Pretty Near Ended Before It Began

"Sideways". Yeah, that pretty much describes it.

You feel like you're progressing, moving 60 mph down the road and your hands firmly on the steering wheel. The horizon looks reachable through your windshield. Then someone tells you, "That's the driver's side window."

Dealing with the medical-industrial complex feels like that.

OK, so I had planned this vacation since February, when I put down the deposit on the 2009 Wine Country Bike Tour package. I haven't been anywhere in 2 and a half years, and caregiving tends to burn you out after that long. (I take care of my wife, who has secondary-progressive MS, in our home.) Four weeks ago, I called the Central Park Rehabilitive Care Facility, where Kathy goes to a day program twice a week, and asked for a two-week block of time in late July, early August.

The admissions coordinator at Central Park said, "No problem!" Two weeks was fine. They had open beds and everything. So I started working on the details - getting the mandatory PRI (Patient R-something Instrument) required for nursing home admission in NY State, scheduling all the stops and starts of transportation, therapy, etc. etc. The Day Program coordinator even pitched in and made some phone calls for me. Everything was going fine.

At the beginning of this week, I had a question and called the admissions coordinator. She wasn't there - she was gone to England on family business. The business officer, being her temporary backup, asked me some details on my wife.

She said, "Hold on a second."

Five minutes later, she returned. "Uhh, I just talked to my head of Nursing. She has no record of Katherine Squair coming on Thursday. And we have no beds open."

I said, "Huh???" (Tex Avery-style eyeball-burst goes here.)

"Well, not only that ... even if we had a bed open, we wouldn't take her. We don't do two-week stays here," the business coordinator replied.

Now let's get this straight. An Admissions Coordinator does not know the most basic detail of admission. And she's making money doing this?

But in context it makes sense. This is the same medical-industrial system that produced the following exemplary workers:

• A Home Health Aide who was convinced a mammogram caused her 24 hours of vomitting
• A nurse who stuck a foley Catheter up the wrong tube and left before checking her work.
• Another HHA who left for the day, only to return 20 minutes later and proclaim, "I put on your shoes by mistake." Her shoes were Crocs. She had put on Kathy's sneakers.

OK, back to the nursing home. Let's just say that if you throw enough social workers at the most intractable problem, you will eventually solve it. So, Kathy has a place to stay. I have the traditional Survivor Guilt - I get to escape this sideways world for two weeks, and she is stuck deeper in it. But I will return to pull her from the muck.


In the meantime, Travellin' Tom and I are getting packed. We're going to Nebraska for a week and California for a week. My aspirations are high. There are lots of interesting people in the world, and I'm going to find me a few ... ride many a mile ... breathe in the fragrance of the almighty grape. Tom's ambitions are more down-to-earth. "I'm going to eat a burrito as big as me!"

Get your helmet on!