He has been transferred to nine hospitals that did not provide the proper care to treat his brain injury, and his combativeness, He has frequently been placed in restraints. I fought hard to bring him home to Ohio on October 10th. He was transferred to a hospital where he started therapy for the first time, but because of his behavior, they fought to discharge him from their facility. He is currently in a different hospital.
The doctors have prescribed medications to calm him down to prevent him from being restrained, but he has been so sedated that he cannot participate in therapy. They are considering transferring him to an inpatient rehabilitation program for brain injury for two weeks, after which they plan to discharge him home. However, I feel that two weeks will not provide enough time for my son to fully benefit from the program, and I do not believe he will be able to handle three hours of therapy each day.
They have indicated that the goal is to discharge him home. Can they really do that? I know that I am not physically or mentally equipped to care for him at home.
His insurance is Medicaid. Please help; this has been an emotional rollercoaster for both my son and me. I want the best for him. Thank you.
What a terrible injury your son must have sustained, and clearly it had devastating effects on his emotional centers controlling his actions in his brain.
You, with all this time and experience, and with the Social Workers at these institutions telling you what is what for your Son's case and the doctor's explaining his diagnosis and prognosis, are really the expert here. I would guess that we will have little information we can give you.
Most of us on aging care are dealing with the dementias that occur with aging. While some of our elders do have troubles with controlling their emotional centers, it is medically recognized that little can be done other than finding the right drugs or "drug cocktails" to attempt to keep our loved ones somewhere between rampaging wildly through home and hallways and sitting asleep 24/7.
It just bears no resemblance to a TBI, and TBI science is so new. It wasn't until wars that gave us percussive injuries injured so many of our young men irreparably that we even recognized this as a diagnosis.
Many TBIs are notorious for very slow healing.
I wonder, and I hope, do you have any access to hospitals specializing in this care, to any of the VA (Veteran's) hospital doctors, who are the best at working with this.
I hope someone here may have some ideas for you, but in all my five or so years on this forum I haven't heard of a TBI this serious. And I know, you being the family, will have researched this out so that, as I said, YOU are the real experts. I cannot come up with a thing for you. Your son will have to be in a state where he can be cared for, where he has some control over his violent outbursts, or he will be required to have medications that medicate him below the state where he is a danger to others. As to take him home in his current state I truly cannot imagine such a thing.
I am so very sorry. This is dreadful. My heart goes out to you and I just keep hearing Dr. Laura in my head with her "Not everything can be fixed" admonition.
I hope that time is the healer here. Brain cells can recover. People do heal. This is unimaginably hard. Can you tell us how your son sustained this awful injury?