Back home again

Well my son Danny is home from his second stint in the hospital. This time he was there for a week, last time it was a month. during all this he has lost about 18 pounds because of being on a liquid diet and the fact that with all his colon problems he has not felt like eating hardly at all. One day last week I was at his room and had given him a carnation instant breakfast sweet berry flavor drink which is one of the few things he would drink. I left the room for a few minutes and when I returned I found that he had spilled it, He was crying and covering his face and head as if he thought that he was going to be punished for it. This has me really bothered because he lives in an intermediate care home for people with developmental disabilities and other conditions such as Cerebral Palsy and now I wonder what may be going on there. Saturday night I received a phone call from the discharge manager at the hospital, She told me that they may be sending him home on Sunday so I called the care home's owner and gave her the heads up.The next day I got another call from the hospital. This time it was to inform me that they had discharged him but that the owner of the care home said that there was no one available to pick him up or to care for him at the house till the next day.

These people are being paid well to care for him and where given 24 hours notice that he was coming home yet they were still unable to do their job. They reluctantly agreed to find some one to pick him up but after I had told the case manager at the hospital the story about spilling the drink she became concerned enough to keep him one more day at the hospital till I could talk with Danny's social worker to make sure that there is no abuse going on at the home.

These homes have a large turn over in employees because of the nature of the work. I know this first hand because I worked as an orderly at a nursing facility.
The home that Danny lives in is also home to three or for other clients that have Cerebral Palsy and are completely non ambulatory. In the five years that he has lived there the staff has changed completely two or three times, Just when you get to know the people caring for your loved ones they leave and a whole new bunch of strangers take over and it takes a while to get to know them and build trust. This problem is compounded by a language barrier because all the staff that the owner hires are usually Filipino and most of them have such thick accents that they are really hard to understand. I really hate to think that something maybe wrong at the home because he has made such great leaps forward in his development since he has been there, But like I said, with change of staff comes different people with different personalities. People like my son depend quite a lot on routine to function in their daily lives and when some one who cares for them has a different way of doing things than the last person it can frustrate and confuse them. So I have called his social worker and asked her to quietly look into things at the home, I really don't want to rock the boat unless there is a real reason to do so. There are very few facilities of this kind in the area and he has done really well there for so long and it is his home.