The Life-Saving Importance of Consistent Home Care

Transcript:

Can you share a memorable story or experience from your time working in home care? Just to give some of our listeners a glance into your life and just maybe some of the fun scenarios that you've been in and maybe some of the more, life saving scenarios that you've been in.

Oh, I have so many stories. So many funny inside jokes, too. One story that really stands out for me is: I was with one of my clients fairly regularly. I saw him a few times a week, and one day I just noticed he looked a little extra pale, and he was just breathing a little bit more than normal during our daily walks.

And I went back through his medical records that I had, and I noticed he hadn't had any blood work done in at least ten months or so. So I called his physician, asked for a generalized blood panel, and, communicated with him the signs that I had been seeing. And so he ordered the blood panel. We got it back, or, we went and got it, and then that morning, the next morning, the results populated. I noticed he was severely anemic, like, dangerously anemic.

Due to my ER background, I knew the protocols of the ER, and they would be giving blood if we had gone to the ER. So we did. I instructed the family to meet me in the ER. By the time we met in the ER, we had gotten a phone call from the physician saying, you need to go to the ER. But luckily, we were already there.

He got, I think, two to three units of blood. He had an internal bleed due to his blood thinners, and nobody was even planning on doing any blood work anytime soon because there was no reason to. So I feel really lucky that my intuition noticed the changes that he was going through, because he couldn't tell me that he was feeling any different. But that was a really close call that I'm really grateful to have been there.