This is a game sort of like Musical Chairs, which also happens to be a game we play when we go to visit my MIL but, naturally, involves rooms. This game is also called, “Guess What Room Mom Is In.”
When my MIL got some sort of infection and they had her back in the hospital (the famous ‘birthing orange‘ trip), she was in 3 different rooms during the 9 days she was in there. The private isolation room was at the tail end of her stay.
The hospital is annoyingly strict about having a visitor’s pass and you can’t reach the elevators without passing the front desk, although there was the time we slipped past because a fight was going on between a patient, a visitor and a security guard. Most times, though, that isn’t possible so we need to get a pass.
“What room are you visiting?”
“459.”
“No one is in that room.”
“That’s where she was yesterday.”
“Well they must have moved her. What’s the name of the patient?” and we’d have to wait for them to look up her room number. Every visit was a guessing game.
When they moved her back to the nursing home, there were no 2-patient rooms available so they stuck her in a 4-patient one. Now that was an adventure! The woman who was always cold was the one near the air conditioner. The only woman in the room who was capable of getting out of bed by herself was the one furthest from the bathroom. All 4 patients needed wheelchairs and the room wasn’t quite big enough for any 2 wheelchairs to pass each other so there was always a juggling act.
“Okay, move that wheelchair over here. Then move the other one out into the hall. Oops, that rolling table is in the way, now.”
When we went to visit her this past Tuesday, we went to the room we thought she was in and found an empty bed. “Someone kidnapped your mother!” I told Frank. Then the nurse caught us and told us she had been moved into a 2-patient room.
That evening, when we arrived home, we called my sister in-law to let her know they had moved mom into a better room. The following day, she called us to tell her they had moved my MIL again - back to the hospital. While we do have a room number, who wants to guess whether she will actually be in that room?
September 28th, 2007 at 3:21 pm Quote
That is really scary
. I hope they never get confused about who she is and start treating her for someone else’s ailments, but nothing would surprise me. I don’t have a lot of faith in the medical community in general.
September 28th, 2007 at 5:19 pm Quote
It probably is a little worriesome for Frank when he goes to his mothes room and see’s an empty bed.
September 28th, 2007 at 5:38 pm Quote
Nah, it’s not really a big deal because we’ve just come to expect it. It makes every visit an adventure. And more than that, Frank isn’t even too bent out of shape over the back & forth to the hospital stuff & all the complications. He said going through all that we did with MY mom for 4 straight months helped him deal with his own mother now.