Thread by @manu_faktur

So, "quick" update after another week. Sadly things haven't quite settled down yet, my dad is currently in the hospital for monitoring over the weekend after he lost consciousness and fell out of his bed in the nursing home yesterday.

https://twitter.com/manu_faktur/status/1469429388055924738

But first things first, as I said last Saturday me and a friend went to his apartment in Munich and I brought home two large boxes filled with folders and loose documents, basically every piece of paper I could find. That was already immensely helpful several times this week.

I also met the neighbors who took care of him, absolutely lovely people. They said they'd want to visit him after his quarantine is over, genuinely caring and being worried for him. (And making me feel like a horrible person for having less of a relationship to my dad than them.)

We had to take care of quite some costs: The at-home PCR test, the locksmith who opened the door when he locked himself in. Plus the repairs for the door afterwards. 🤡 New house-shoes, also toiletries which are apparently not provided in a nursing home, which is odd to me.

He lost the key for his mailbox, but we now did a change of address order so that all his mail will automatically be sent to me instead. I wish we had done that sooner, as it takes a week to activate. So the neighbors had to "steal" a few letters out of the mailbox to send to me.

One of those letters was particularly important, the official announcement for the date when the level of his needs ("Pflegegrad", used to be "Pflegestufe") is newly judged by the state. This is hugely important as it defines how much money he gets from long-term care insurance.

Ever since his problems started he was already at level 2, but from what I've seen even with level 5 it might actually not cover all the costs for a permanent place in the nursing home. Maybe his personal insurance covers the rest? Still a bit foggy to me how this all works.

Anyways, this new judgement of his condition will take place on Dec. 27th, which is right in the middle of the short-term care period, so seems okay. Due to Corona they only do it via phone currently, which I'm not quite sure yet how that will work when he can barely speak.

I suppose me and my brother, as well as maybe his main nurse in the home can be there with him on the phone, plus possibly his neurologist and general practitioner added via conference call. I cringe just thinking of it, I absolutely dread all kinds of official phone calls.

Trying to get access to his bank accounts (I'm allowed via power of attorney, we just want to know if and what is there so we have a better picture of the whole situation) was also tricky. Pro-tip: Enable SMS forwarding for iMessage, sadly we forgot that before the quarantine.

I have one of his iPads (he had two, it seems he can now only use the small one comfortably) here at home with me, it would have been very useful to get 2FA SMS to it. I still got into one account and found a fairly large sum that his life insurance paid out a few years back.

That's a huge relief as it means we can more easily pay for things quickly in case of any new emergencies, and when we asked him about his finances in the past weeks he was often confused and unsure, and even said he thinks he is broke multiple times. Luckily that's not the case.

So with all that settled, we actually felt pretty good until yesterday evening the hospital called us out of the blue. He fell out of bed and had cramps afterwards, so the nursing home called an ambulance. They did a CT scan, leading to a fairly ridiculous conversation where …

… they asked us if we knew he had this, like, huge-ass tumor in his brain. Yes, we are. Very much. No, he doesn't want it to be treated. No, we don't know why. Having basically none of his medical history as he was just brought into this town last week, they were a bit shocked.

Luckily I also grabbed a gigantic folder with this medical history, including a ton of CDs (!) with images of earlier CT scans, from Munich. It is absolutely mind-boggling to me that all this information is not extremely easily and readily available to be shared between doctors.

Instead, I had to rush to the hospital today and bring over all those documents. It's 2021, today I was on a video call with coworkers in the UK, America and Asia. Crisp HD with no delays. But apparently one can't email a CT scan from one hospital to another? I don't understand.

He doesn't remember the fall, but he's responsive and not hurt from the fall. The hospital will now try to gauge if the tumor has grown or not, in order to determine the cause for why his health went south so badly in the past weeks. They'll monitor him at least over the weekend.

In the meantime, we also got more homework from the nursing home, apparently he doesn't like the food there (I don't blame him, it's basically "varieties of meat, with some meat on the side" every day), so they asked us to write a list of what he likes. (Spoiler: I don't know!)

As a quick aside: During all of this I also can't help but at times think stuff like "You didn't even take proper care for me as a child, and now I have to take care of you, fuck this." which is basically my mind adding extra stress and guilt into the mix, super fun to deal with!

So that's where we're at right now. It's still rough, we both can't sleep well (also the fact that the hospital called me a few more times around 1am to get some more information for a CT scan they apparently then did the morning after didn't help with that particular problem).

At least before he got into the hospital he seemed to do slightly better and get a bit used to his new surroundings. He said he was bored, which to us seemed much better than him just sleeping all day which he did for the first weekend. Let's hope he's back to being bored soon.