Five+ hour visit. Mostly because my mom can’t get to the point. Also, the nurse was 45 minutes late.
Still, it went well.
If you want to know where I get the gene for being difficult, it’s my mom.
The biggest stumbling block today was the green form, or POLST. I can’t remember what that stands for. My mom has a health care directive. She thought long and hard about what she wants and wrote out two pages of instructions for what to do in case she is incapacitated. She wrote this up last summer. The short version of it is she doesn’t want any intervention to prolong her life if her incapacitation is due to her A.L.S. But if it’s something else, like a heart attack or a tree falls on her, she wants the measures.
The green form asks just a few questions: do you want CPR? do you want no resuscitation, limited measures, or to go all out? do you want anti-biotics? do you want tube feeding?
If hospice has to call emergency personnel, they aren’t going to spend 10 minutes parsing the details of her health care directive. My mom doesn’t like the simple form. Why did I write a health care directive then?
Thing is, if she doesn’t select something on the form, hospice provides the maximum intervention.
POLST= Physician Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment. The Green form honestly more useful for paramedics if someone calls 911, because it can happen. You still need Advanced Directives if there is a GIP/in patient admission, and just know that both papers are needed, as no one is going to go looking for Advanced Directives if someone panics and calls 911. They need to see that form. There is a large difference between antibiotics for comfort ie-UTI vs to prolong life, and you need that onsite. **PS, as someone who does home care/hospice– Yes, we can be late. We cannot control traffic, road work, weather conditions, pulling over for pages/calls we receive on the road or the amount of time spent on the visit prior, as emergencies of all levels can arise. I give a time frame of when I will arrive. If feel I will go outside of that time frame, I call to say I’ll be late–if the bars on the cell phone are availible. We don’t just sit in an office all day, waiting to see that 1 person at that certain time. We see many people in a day. I have to vent, because I get tired of people not understanding why we can’t arrive at exactly X time.
Oh, I know what the green form is for. My mom wants everyone, including paramedics, to know and understand her advanced directive. It ain’t realistic, but that’s what she wants.
My mom is the person who sent my father back to a store to collect 11 cents that the store messed up on change. She likes things complicated and perfect.