A story I wrote about home health care workers is in a special section of the New York Post today. Only took me 41 years to get into a New York City daily newspaper.
But a funny thing happened as I sat down last week to finish that story about home health care: my father started receiving home health care.
“We’ve had a visiting nurse here,” my mom told me on the morning that my story was due. “Listen: those people are better than the hospital.”My parents and grandparents have had enough health care challenges—two open-heart surgeries, successful battles against leukemia and breast cancer among them—for me to have seen some great nursing from an up-close and personal vantage point. But the latest challenge, my 79-year-old father’s fall in front of his building, brought nursing right into my parents’ Riverdale apartment building.
The nurse did so much in about a just over an hour’s time: she filled out the forms (maybe the scariest part for my family and many others), she called the doctor for information, she straightened out the prescriptions (“she knows medicines,” my mother said) and taught my dad how to give himself an injection and she took his blood pressure, measuring the difference between his sitting down and standing up.
Or, as my mom put it when asked what the nurse did: “Everything. Everything.”During a scary time, these are the people who make things a little less scary.
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