A Desperate Prayer with 18 Days Left - March 18, 2012

18 days remain for me,
In the country of my heart
What am I going to miss the most,
Where does the list begin to start?

India, vast and mysterious,
Is forever enticing me,
I've barely seen a tiny bit,
Of all I want to see.

My palate's tasted every food,

And spicy daunts me not,

The breads are bits of heaven,

I could be fatter but I'm not.

I feel so full of love these months,

So welcome where I've gone,

From my Royal Caribbean friends,

To perfect strangers, I've been drawn.

I pray to the gods and goddesses,
To grant my safe return,
For until I touch this shore once more,
My heart will ever yearn. 

Carmen Henesy

Copyright (c) 2012 by Carmen Henesy
All rights reserved. 

My Mother Is In Good Hands

While I haven't yet been up to see my mom at her new residence, I am very happy to read the latest news about Gwinnett Extended Care and two other facilities in the area.  We were very fortunate to find an open bed at this facility, something that is very rare indeed.

The GwinnettDailyPost.com had this to say: 

LAWRENCEVILLE — Adam Pomeranz was out of the state at a conference when he got a voice mail from the chairman of Annandale Village’s Board of Directors asking him to return the call.



“I couldn’t tell by the tone of his voice what (the call was about) so I was a little apprehensive,” remembered Pomeranz, who serves as executive director of Annandale.


But the news turned out to be good.


Charles Lotz had just picked up a copy of U.S. News & World Report and read about the overall five-star rating D. Scott Hudgens Center for Skilled Nursing had received for the current quarter. The center was one of three in Gwinnett that received the rating.


“He’s been on the board 35 years,” Pomeranz said of Lotz. “He’s watched Annandale grow from serving eight people to now 130. He was just thrilled. He was ecstatic when I called him.”


The Suwanee nursing home is owned and operated by Annandale Village of Suwanee, a community that serves adults with developmental disabilities. The D. Scott Hudgens Center for Skilled Nursing provides all of the services of a traditional nursing home while specializing filling the needs of individuals with a primary diagnosis of mental retardation or other developmental disabilities.


It was the only nursing home in Georgia with a five-star rating mentioned in the print edition of U.S. News & World Report.


“That rating in a national publication like that validates and reinforces our approach and everything we do,” Pomeranz said. “We get a lot of that from our villagers themselves, but it’s nice to see it from an outside source.”


Two other Gwinnett County nursing homes — Gwinnett Extended Care at Gwinnett Medical Center in Lawrenceville and Parkwood Living Center of Snellville — also received five stars overall in U.S. News & World Report’s quarterly ratings of most the nation’s 16,000-plus nursing homes. The ratings are based on a program run by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which analyzes information on all homes enrolled in those governmental programs.


“It means that we’re on target in providing excellence in care to our residents,” said Tamey Stith, administrator for Gwinnett Extended Care. “They’re satisfied, as evidenced by our rating.”


The overall ratings are based on three areas of evaluation: health inspections conducted at each nursing home, the average time nurses spend with each patient and measures of quality of care.


The three Gwinnett facilities join only 1,855 other five-star nursing homes in the nation for the current quarter.


“It validates everything that we do and everything that we stand for,” Pomeranz said. “We believe in the highest quality of care and doing whatever we have to do that ensures that every villager gets the highest quality.”

My brother tells me he is very impressed with the staff and the care my mother is receiving at Gwinnett Extended Care.  She is going daily to physical therapy and the speech therapist has arranged to have her meals more pureed since she seems to be having difficulty swallowing.  She still doesn't seem to know my brother or me but I have talked to her on the phone.  She is getting a shampoo and set on Thursday so my boys will see their "Grandma" looking a little more like her old self.  I'll pick them up at the airport at 7:30AM Friday and we'll head straight to see her.  I have really missed her during this lonely week at her apartment.  I've managed to give away many of her things to one of the local missions and have gotten to the backs, transferred CDs into a checking for her care at Gwinnett, and tomorrow I go for a massage.  Boy, do I need it.  I have never been so stressed.

Thanks again for the bombarding of heaven on behalf of my mom.  How else would we have gotten the bed at Gwinnett which almost never has availability?  I truly cherish you all so much and can never express my gratitude.  I long to be back writing and reading and commenting but bear with me a week longer till I get home and resume a more normal life.

Much love and hugs to you all.

The Latest From Columbus, Georgia and My Mother

Please forgive me, my friends, for my long absence from cyberspace.  I try to catch up on all your wonderful blogs, partly as a way to stay grounded and less depressed in this difficult time, and because I miss everyone so much.  St. Francis Hospital has wi-fi but, it seemed as soon as I settled down for a moment to read or write while my mom dozed, a nurse would come in and need my help with something or it would be time to try to feed her again.

Mary Frances McGee Quinlan is better, I can say that.  On Friday, she was actually discharged from the intermediate cardiac care unit at St. Francis and her physicians deemed her fit enough to be driven to her assisted living and rehab facility near my brother's home in Atlanta.  When Charley arrived she knew that he was her son but she didn't remember her name.  Alternately during her hospitalization, she could identify that I was her daughter but she seldom knew my name.  During the drive, Charley reported that she was very quiet, asking on occasion, who he was and were they going home.  Once at Gwinnett Extended Care, she was so exhausted, she was just put to bed.  She is legally blind from macular degeneration so things, at best, are a little confusing for her. 

The facility, for this type of place, is actually very good.  My sister-in-law, who is also an R.N., used to work next door in the hospital, another reason we chose it.  With her medical problems, it is good to have acute care so close.  Also, she will have P.T. and speech therapy.  It isn't cheap - $6000/month.  For the first 90 days, Medicare pays, then she must exhaust all her own funds ( there go the CDs she put aside for my brother and I and her grandsons ), then Medicaid will cover.  The law now is that any assets must have been disposed of five years prior to admission to such a facility if you wish your heirs to have them.  My understanding is that this is the same in each state.  My mother was so upset about this when we discussed financial issues a year ago.  She wanted to take her CDs out then and give them to all the people involved but I explained that the state would come back to each person and demand the money back if she were admitted to a nursing home or extended care within the five year time frame.  She was despondent over this.  I guess it behooves us to be more aware of state laws regarding these issues.  The money is irrelative to us but it made my mother furious.

I have the task of clearing out her apartment and disposing of everything.  Fortunately, over the last few years, my mom has given us all her things of real value so it isn't so hard.  My two youngest sons, Alex and his fiancee, Laura, ( who is wearing my mother's diamond engagement ring as hers ) and Jeremy, and his girlfriend, Katie, will fly into Atlanta on Friday morning.  I'll pick them up at the airport and we'll visit mom and then drive to Columbus.  The boys wanted their ladies to see where they spent so many happy times and to visit my friends,
Beth and Luther, and to go out for catfish and hushpuppies one last time.  Saturday morning, my brother will drive down with a truck and the two hefty jocks will help their uncle load up any furniture he might want. 

The rest of the weekend, we'll spend visiting mother at the extended care and they'll see a little of Atlanta.  They fly back to San Francisco Sunday PM but I'll stay in Atlanta till March 10th.  I will be able to visit several times a  day with mother and spend time with my brother and his wife in their new home.   I am just so relieved that they moved back from their eight year sojourn in Florida this past December.  I have really had most of the responsibility mom's care since that time since Susan, my sister-in-law, has had to come to Atlanta once a month to oversee her own mother's care ( she was in a nursing home the whole time they lived in Florida! ). 

Another bright spot on the horizon is that I will see a friend of 51 years who was at boarding school with me in the 9th grade in Cullman, Alabama.  She lives in the Atlanta area and I haven't seen her since she and her husband came to the West Coast a few years ago to cruise the Pacific Northwest with us.  After the last ten days, I relish any bright spot.

I miss all of you and please continue your prayers for my mother and me.

The Soul of a Child

I had a phone call this morning from a dear friend, delightedly announcing the birth of her first grandchild.  I have a bit of a cold, a remnant, I think, of my European vacation, so I won't go yet to see the new addition to the family but I made a card out of a poem I wrote a few years back.  On my morning rounds at the hospital, I always stopped by the newborn nursery ( a huge place at San Francisco General Hospital ) and gazed in awe at its precious inhabitants.  They were the inspiration for this poem.  The baby in the picture is my son, Alex, now 27-years-old, 6'4" tall, and soon to be married.  I didn't have any other baby pictures handy so I hope he will forgive me for using his.

The Soul of a Child

I gaze through nursery windows,
At babes so newly born,
Tightly wrapped in pink and blue,
Stocking caps their heads adorn.

Their needs right now are simple,
They know not yet of strife,
I pray it will remain this way,
Throughout all of their life.

I hope they never suffer,
And wish them food and love,
And, most of all I wish for them,
God's bounty from above.

I hope these babies will succeed,
And the angels will have smiled,
Every step along the way,
Upon the soul of every child.

Carmen Henesy

Copyright (c) 2007 by Carmen Henesy
All rights reserved.