Nursing Home Visit – Third Time is the Charm!

We did it!  We accomplished our last step in getting Hannah Medicaid and on the Medically Dependent Children’s Program!!!  We satisfied our nursing home stay requirement.

We left Friday after the kids came home from school.  We made sure Hannah had a good nap right before, a full tummy, and was just as happy as we could make her.  We figured we would leave the day before just to make sure we would make it and give us the chance to spend the night along the way if we needed it.  Fortunately, we made it all the way with only three Hannah tantrum episodes where we had to get her out of the car and calm her down.

We had a 11 am check-in time, and we decided we would check in around 10 am.   It figures that our car battery died AGAIN, and we were scrambling to get AAA there starting at 9:00 am (the nursing home is 15 minutes from the hotel).  We were ALMOST ready to call a cab at 10:20 when AAA finally showed up!  We made it to the nursing home with 8 minutes to spare.

It wasn’t as bad as I expected, but it definitely was a nursing home environment with many elderly people just sitting around, some in wheelchairs, and some just talking to themselves in the hallway.  We checked in, and Hannah crashed on the bed in our room.  So Daddy took Ethan and Abigail to Chuck-E-Cheese for a couple of hours.

Fortunately, we were able to leave the nursing home for a break because we just needed to check in every 2 hours because they want to know the “status” of how Hannah was doing.   When we finally got back at 8:45 pm for the night, Hannah and I locked our room door (as our nurse instructed us to do), and made ourselves as comfortable as possible.

It was a freezing room, and the train tracks were right outside our window.   That wasn’t the worst part.  At 5:30 am, I heard a banging on our room door.  I thought it was one of the nurses, but it was an elderly man in a wheelchair banging on my door.  I saw him, and I quickly closed to door, remembering in the back of my mind that the nurses said not to open the door (they have keys to our room).  Freaked me out a bit, but oh well.

I didn’t get much sleep anyway.  I fell asleep around midnight, woke up at 1:30 am to change Hannah (she slept in the queen bed next to me).  Then, Hannah woke up at 4 am “just because.”   Checkout was at 6:30 am, and sure enough, Daddy, Ethan, and Abigail picked us up right on time!  I couldn’t get out of there any faster.

We went back to the hotel for a quick breakfast, and then we headed out on the road.  It was a rough time getting home, as Hannah had about 8 or 9 episodes on the way home, including four times having to stop on the side of the highway to take her out of the car to get her to calm down.  She was exhausted, hungry, and did not want to be in her carseat.  We stopped for lunch about halfway through, and she fell asleep in the restaurant.  Unfortunately, that “nap” wasn’t enough, and she woke up as we put her back in the car.  We ended up sitting in the parking lot for about 20 minutes just to get her calmed down enough where we could put her back in the carseat.   We even had to stop twice about 2 miles from our house and a block from our house.

But we made it.  It is done.  Our 10-month process of trying to get Hannah onto this program is done.  Now I just need to get our case manager to finalize everything, and then we can start looking into getting some help!  Hopefully that won’t take too long, but I have already been warned by another mom that I need to keep on him to get it done.

But we made it.  Nursing home visit — DONE!