Hospital and deafness:

 As always I'm writing this after the fact and as you've no doubt realised it's been a long time since I last blogged.  There are various reasons for this, primarily the level of care I was providing had to increase and with it the length of my days and I can safely say I never want to do 40 hour days again!

As often happens when you care for someone there are things outside of your control and that means either hospital outpatient appointments or inpatient times.  For me that came because we were awaiting an assessment for more eqiupment that had previously been refused.  

Whilst we were waiting my caree had a fall.  A fractured femur that required surgery.  Unfortunately to mkae things slightly more complicated the fractured femur was on the same side as the pelvic TB was it's worse.  As a result there was no way she was going to be using that leg as much as mobility was going to be even restricted.  

The other leg had severe arthritis and was no longer able to weight bare and joint replacements were not an option.

Surgery was apparently straight forward, it was a complicated break but a pin and some metal plates were going to sort that and medically she was fit for surgery.

The phone call was extremely difficult to understand and as such I had to go to the hospital to understand what was going on and encourage as LPOA consent for the surgery.

Surgery went well but the masks and one per bed made life really tricky as it meant that I had no way of lipreading staff or someone to interpret for me.  I fully back limiting the spread of infection but it also has to be realistic. 

I visted daily both due to wanting to but mostly because it was the only way I could get any form of updates on what was going on.  It's exhausting and quite honestly communication from those who should be trained to communicate regardless of barriers just wasn't there.

I don't think it will change either, no matter how many times I said I can't hear you, nothing changed.  There were clear guidelines on what not to do but nothing on meeting either the needs of the patient [caree also hard of hearing] or the family who needed to understand what was going on.

There just doesn't seem to be any way of making it easier or for others to understand the difficulties of communcating with a deaf/hearing loss person especially with those who need to get important information across.

Some staff were better than others and in a follow up post I'll discuss what that was and how it came about.  

I found a lot of background things that needed to happen could only happen via phone call...both with social care, urgent care etc it all had to happen by phone rather than in person or email.  Despite being told that Covid had changed things for the better with an increased use of technology as far as I can tell that just hasn't happened.