It'll be a quiet morning...

...here at "the halls".

This morning we've got another another little side trip in our ongoing medical odyssey with Neophyte's stubborn ol' G-Dad.

This'll be our third trip out to faraway doctor-land in three days... but I think he's finally decided to stop fighting and just go with the flow. I figured it was gonna get ugly when I told him he was stuck out at our place at least into December... but things are starting to settle down.

It started out last Sunday when we got G-Dad to agree to come out here (we're a couple of hours down the road) and see the E.R. doc. Unfortunately, by the next morning, he had changed his octogenarian mind and requested that we just take him home. After frantically rooting around, we found someone with a glucometer... and he finally agreed to just do that.

The glucometer test was a tipping point... turns out the drug company blood sugar charts only go as high as 23... and "Mr I'm Just Fine"... was cresting 32. The fact that he's also skinny enough to blend in with all those pictures of starving African refugees and weak as a kitten was the icing on the cake. He can't even comfortably sit on an unpadded chair any more... it was that bad.

The cold, hard truth is, if we hadn't gone into Toronto this past weekend to check on him, he likely wouldn't have made it through the week. Thank goodness for Mrs N's intuition.

The sunny side, if there is such a thing here, about things being so far gone... was that the horrified look on the technician's face after taking the glucometer reading and his unequivocal recommendation of immediate medical intervention... was enough to break the logjam.

Of course, all that didn't stop G-Dad from grousing about the stupid hospital gown and fantasizing about fleeing the examining room when we were waiting for the tests to come back... but hell, I'm a "hate hospitals" kinda guy myself. Regardless... I stuck my sympathy in my back pocket... and told him Mrs N had his personal power of attorney and, like it or not, we were pulling rank on this one.

From that point on, we've had a much smoother ride... from the gratis glucometer session to the E.R. doc who got us in to see an internal medicine specialist on 18 hours notice. The specialist was just great (he was obviously booking us in on his lunch hour)... and we're back in the first week of December to discuss test results and progress.

So we're off early today for supplementary tests... meanwhile G-Dad's already on blood sugar meds and an iron supplement. Mrs N's also working on a proper diet. We've picked up our own glucometer and we'll start tracking the readings to make sure the meds are working.

Maybe we're gonna get a happy ending outta this after all.

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