Update

So, it's been a few weeks, here's what's happening in my neck of the woods...

So, gotta love th VA Hospital[sic]. It's really similar to any other system of people I've ever encountered though...the underlings don't like their jobs and therefore don't really care about what's going or how the crappy jobs they do affect others mixed with a healthy dose of really good upper level people who are awesome when you can get in contact with them all backed by a computer system that people use correctly or incorrectly that tends to wrongly determine the fate of the customers unless they ask the proper questions.

It seems like no one area is good with communicating with another area in there. Lemme explain some of the wonderful things that have been happening to us there, and why that link and information on being an Empowered Patient that I shared before is ever more important...

First cancelled appointment: We go to the hospital and mom is aware that she has an appointment to get some test results. We get there and no one can find any record that she had an appointment. NO. ONE. Besides the fact that she's got it printed out and her social worker called her to make sure she remembered to go to the appointment. The best they can finally come up with is that the appointment got cancelled on the day they discharged her from the hospital because when you're an inpatient that's what they do. The probelm is no one checked and saw that she was discharged and just cancelled the appointment. Fun. I'm glad we're not travelling a long distance for this crap.

First chemotherapy session: I (naïvely, stupidly, and all kinds of other-ly's) decided that since mom could get transportation the to hospital I didn't need to take her to her first round of chemo. I know. I suck. In my weak defense all this had been sprung on me and I didn't know how to deal with it at the time. Anyway, my plan was to pick her up when she was done and take her home and put her in bed. Halfway through the day grandma call me worried because she hasn't heard from mom yet. I figure its fine and calm her down. By the time I get off work I still hadn't heard anything and called mom's cell and house phones. Nothing. I call the hospital and get passed around by the operator until someone who wasn't too lazy to look in the computer does so and tells me where she is. I talk to her and she sounds a bit scared and a whole lot of confused. I run off and go to the hospital. They want to keep her overnight for observation, because this is the first time she's had chemo and she's really weak from dehydration. She's not having a bit of that, mostly because she had no knowledge that something like that could happen, wasn't prepared, and just wanted to go home and be left alone for the night. They give her a second round of chemo and 1L of saline and we're on our merry, confused, and pissed off way. There's more to that story but its a different subject and thus will be reserved for another time.

Next, False Surgery: The next week she has an appointment for general surgery. She has no idea what this appointment is about, and neither do I. It says minor procedure. Here's the deal, whenever you get a discharge sheet or ask for your appointments, you get a printout that tells you dates, times, and a small description of your appointments. This isn't a bad system, but it'd be better if it had a little bit more info on it. So we go to the hospital. We get checked in and they don't know what the appointment is for. We get told to go to surgery and they don't know what the appointment is for. We get to surgery and THEY don't know what the appointment is for. Umm, really? >_< A doctor guy comes out and brings us back, and would have just gotten her ready and gone on with the surgery but I made sure to ask him, "HEY, WHAT ARE  WE HERE FOR?" He takes us to an office and, long convo short, we're there for biopsies that happened BEFORE MOM WAS DISCHARGED. She had been discharged for like 2 WEEKS. WTF?

One more 'gain, False Appointment time: Friday come along and we see she has an appointment with oncology for treatment. We travel to the hospital and go to oncology. They look at us like "The hell are you doing in here..." and tell us to go to the lab for blood work, and then to go check in with the nurse. We go to the lab. Mom (confused and misinformed) tells them they can't draw blood out of her arm and must take it from her port (basically a surgically inserted iv). They say they can't take it out the port, because they don't do that in the lab. We go back to oncology. They end up drawing it from her arm and sending us to check in. The check-in nurse takes us back to oncology when she's done and they are confused as to why we didn't see the doctor. Oncology nurse goes to talk to the doctor and tells us we have no appointment. Asks us why we thought we did. I showed her mom's printout AND pointed to it on HER printout. Why do YOU think we thought that? We end up in palliative care because they told her to go as a walk in and that the doctor talked to someone in that unit. We get there, and THEY have NO IDEA what is going on either. BLAH.

Clusterfuckery. That's the only word I can use to describe the VA right now. CLUSTERFUCKERY. I know they aren't focused on making mom better, but they claim to want to help her quality of life. How much quality can one have if they keep having to go back and forth to the hospital...FOR NO REASON?

CLUSTERFUCKERY.