Who Cares?

I’m sort of beside myself on Dan’s behalf today.

Dan has had impacted wax in his ears for about a month. Harbor House has used ear drops several times in an effort to clear them up, but that hasn’t worked. At present (and for the past few weeks), Dan has very little hearing—too little to be able to communicate with me by phone, too little to watch TV with any satisfaction (closed captioning doesn’t help, because he has an aphasia that makes reading in sentences impossible). He can’t listen to the radio. Harbor’s staff doctor hasn’t been able to help him, so after several attempts to get his ears irrigated, I finally requested that he get an appointment with another doctor. His nurse set up an appointment for him with an ENT specialist—a month from now.

Another month of addressable deafness just isn’t acceptable. His current inability to hear compounds the challenges he faces communicating with others on a daily basis. Also, prolonged wax impaction can cause permanent hearing loss. So…what the hell?

Yesterday, after receiving word of the delay in Dan’s treatment, I spoke with a woman at the doctor’s office where Dan was a patient for the 18 months he lived in a waiver home. I asked for information on the cost of getting his ears irrigated without Medicare and Medicaid or other insurance paying for it. (He isn’t covered for this service at a family practice rather than at Harbor House, because it’s assumed that he could get his ears flushed in-house.) The woman I spoke to said she’d call back with the info yesterday. She didn’t. Today I spent 20 minutes on hold (no exaggeration) before leaving a voicemail. Still no word.

I guess I’ll check with a walk-in medical facility, or maybe my family doctor. Dan is understandably concerned, and the quality of his life has plummeted. So I’ll have to arrange something on Monday; I just don’t yet know how much it will cost, although without insurance it most likely will be unreasonable.

What do nursing homes residents do when such a problem arises and they have no one to run interference for them, or funds to help pay for something like this?

I guess they just go deaf.