Skip to main content

All Better? Why go to Rehab?

They tried to make me go to rehab, I said no, no, no. -Amy Winehouse

My mother is home from the hospital, where she arrived weak and dehydrated last Thursday. She thinks that an antibiotic made her ill.* My mother uses a wheelchair but she can stand up and she can walk with a walker. She couldn't use her legs when she went to the hospital, but by Monday, she could transfer herself from the bed to the wheelchair with no help, just someone to spot her.

The hospital wanted her to go to rehab, but like Amy Winehouse, she said no, no, no, for good reasons:

  • She felt well enough to go home.
  • Rehab is expensive.
  • They feed you a crappy diet at rehab--crappy meaning full of carbage. It's especially unhealthy when you're diabetic, like my mother.
  • Got normal blood sugar? They're johnny-on-the-spot with the orange juice to jack it back up.
  • Mom was assaulted at a rehab center a few years ago. The person was never brought to justice.

Being home and careful about her diet, Mom's fasting blood sugar is getting back to normal--111 this morning, down from 257 after the regrettable waffle breakfast at the hospital. She's back to puttering around the house. It helps that she refuses to take the statins her regular doctor ordered and lower her insulin dosage as the doctor at the hospital recommended. She doesn't have heart disease and her A1C is 5.0--that's a normal level. Why should she change her medication?

I think most medical professionals are caring people, but some are too eager to sell their services and products, which can do a lot of harm to patients' health and bank account balance in some cases. Let the patient beware.

*Too late, I found that coconut oil might have cured the infection.

Comments

tess said…
yea! i'm glad she's better, AND has the sense to do what her body and REAL science say is good. :-)

Lori Miller said…
Mom's not a science buff, but she knows better than to take something that's working and do the opposite.
Anonymous said…
"•Mom was assaulted at a rehab center a few years ago."

Oh my God! That's awful. I'm glad she's feeling better, Lori.
I think a lot of medical types WANT to feel that they are doing good, and it just wouldn't occur to them that they may be actively harming people.
Lori Miller said…
She was assaulted by a staff member and sustained a brain injury that left her barely able to speak for a week. Sad to say, some conventional medical treatments will do worse than that. No doubt, it's hard for medical professionals to admit they may have been harming people.
Lori your mom must feel so much better for being at home and "back to puttering around the house" Just the fact that she can and is doing so must make her feel so much better. Wishing her a continued good recovery

All the best Jan
Lori Miller said…
Thanks, Jan. She took away my father's statins yesterday, so he should start feeling better soon, too.

Popular posts from this blog

Thanksgiving recipes for Pumpkin Pie & Cranberries--printable!

If you'd rather read a printed recipe than watch a video, here are my recent recipes for Better than Grandma's Pumpkin Pie and Probiotic Cranberry-Apple Relish.  Hat tip to Dana Carpender, whose pumpkin pie recipe inspired this one. The cranberry-apple ferment is entirely my own creation.  Pumpkin Pie--no grains, sugar or emulsifiers Crust 2 cups shelled raw pecans 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon monk fruit powder* (or 3 tablespoons sugar substitute) 4 tablespoons butter, melted 2 tablespoons water Pumpkin Pie Filling 1 pie pumpkin 1-1/2 cups half and half (with no thickeners) 3 eggs 3-4 teaspoons monk fruit powder* (or 3/4 cup sugar substitute) 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon pumpkin pie spice Preheat the oven to 350F. Stab the top of the pumpkin all the way through the flesh in a few places at the top. Place the pumpkin on a cookie sheet and bake for 1 hour. Let cool. While the pumpkin is baking, put the pecans in a food processor with the S blade and run until they are finely...

Fly with Reuteri

If you're planning to travel by plane and you want to keep enjoying the benefits of l. reuteri yogurt, you might have gotten sticker shock from the price of l. reuteri probiotics. MyReuteri * costs $46 to $83 for 30 capsules, depending on the CFUs (colony-forming units, or the number of viable microorganisms). If you're thinking about economizing by putting some yogurt in a sturdy container and taking it with you, you can do that. I'll break down the pros and cons and look at some alternatives.  Photo from Unsplash . Cost Yogurt might be less expensive than probiotics, but it isn't free. A half-cup serving costs about 70¢ to make if you start with a previous batch. It contains about 90 billion CFUs if fermented for 36 hours.  This is a lot less than $5.56 for two capsules of 50 billion CFU MyReuteri, but for a one-week vacation, you'd only save $34 by eating yogurt instead. (You can freeze any unused capsules for later.)  Furthermore, the yogurt would have to go in ...

30-second Fix for a Cracked Stick Blender

Use Mighty Fixit (if you still have some from 2012) or Rescue Tape (which looks like a similar product) to fix a cracked stick blender. After I fixed the attachment, I washed it in the sink and the tape held up. I also wrapped a knife handle several years ago, and it's been through thousands of washings.

Cigna is Making Progress

Yesterday as I put my lunch in the refrigerator at work, I noticed a bunch of unfamiliar people in the break room. One of them, Pepe, started in: they were there for the health fair, they would check your cholesterol, the sugar in your blood, your height, your weight, and it would just take six minutes. A coworker asked him if he'd ever considered a career in sales. Just for blog fodder, I participated. They really were fast, and one even found me at my desk (in an office nearly half the size of a city block) after the tests were finished. My HDL cholesterol was 65--up from 42 from a year and a half ago, and up from 57, where it was last year when I'd been three months a low-carb diet . A level over 60 is considered good. I haven't taken any medication to make this happen. I went on a low-carb diet and eliminated wheat. I also take vitamin and mineral supplements in addition to a high-nutrient diet. What impressed me more, though, was that the nurse (and Cigna) said that bl...

Holiday Dinner Tip from Restaurant Pros: Limit the Menu

After watching some people online getting freaked out about trying to put on holiday dinners and getting overwhelmed to the point that they're thinking about canceling the whole thing, I thought I'd put out a restaurant tip that will help people put on a dinner with less aggravation. A big complaint among the frustrated home cooks I've seen is that family members are not contributing to the dinner. But a bigger problem I see is that their menu is just too big. One lady's family is having her make 12 dishes all by herself, and some of these dishes look pretty complicated. Watch the video here or read on. The reason this is aggravating is that more dishes mean more shopping, more prep, and more cleanup. It's hard to make several dishes that will all be ready at the same time. Even though I used to be a prep cook at a restaurant, I've put on Thanksgiving dinners myself, and I cook from scratch almost every day, there's no way I'd try to make a 12-course di...