He is in severe pain. Dad also is battling congestion which may be due to pneumonia. He was hospitalized in December for severe dehydration. I feel that dad's rib is bruised or broken but do not want to send him back to the ER for further testing. He is taking morphine for pain and a nebulizer every 6 hours. My question: Do you blame the nursing facility for the fall? I don't want to see him suffer any longer.
There's pretty much nothing that can be done about a cracked rib. In the old days, they would wrap it. That lead to pneumonia so they stopped. So now they don't do anything at all. So other than the knowledge of knowing it for certain, is there much point in going back to the ER.
Is the morphine for the ribs or something else? Grandma has cracked her ribs twice from falls. Each time, the doctors were really hesitant to put her on anything more than Tylenol. Which recent studies have shown is just as effective as opiates for pain relief. Opiates have unwanted side effects.
If Dad is on Hospice, they usually don't allow hospital visits. Not much they do about ribs but tape them anyway. Has he been taped to help with the pain? Could they bring in a portable Xray to make sure the rib isn't interferring with his lungs or something. The whole thjnk with Hospice is to be pain free.
Was the NH at fault for the falls? It's hard not to look for someone to blame after a horrible accident, although with hindsight we can often find the cause it isn't usually the result of negligence, sometimes in life bad things just happen.
Sending a person with late stage dementia to an ER is beyond cruel, in my opinion.
Elders fall. They fall at home and they fall in Nursing Homes. My mom fell in AL with two aides in the room. Her final fall, in her NH, where she had resided for 4 1/2 years, happened while she was being taken to the toilet by an experienced aide. The aide asked my mom to hold the bar in front of her so her pants could be raised. This was their usual routine, only this time, my mother didn't grab the bar (she had been visibly declining during the previous month; something was "up", but we didn't know what). She didn't grab the bar and she fell against the tiled wall.
The NH called my brother, who had POA and he approved a trip to the ER. Her wrist was broken, which was stabilized. You will never convince me that it wasn't actually the ambulance trip that led to her death, not the fall itself.