Last year’s holiday star was for my friend Harry Urban, and showed my enjoyment of embroidery.
This year’s star shows six sharp “pointy” points.
The hard plastic i swallowed had only three pointty points, but at almost 1″ square, that was way too much for my throat.

//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js
December Star 2021; Clicking on the picture above will take you to HiRes copy of this digital Painting at my Flickr Acct.  From there, if you click on picture, you can see greater detail. >> https://www.flickr.com/photos/194191353@N04/51737390637/in/dateposted-public/ .

.Tru here.

i am NOT stupid !
Instead dementia symptoms interfere, and sometimes we make decisions that show we are not thinking thru our actions very well.
Behaviors that can carry heavy consequences, but ….
Cause and Effect sometimes just do not connect.

.

Excitement here for the past few days;

*. Abt 8pm on last Friday evening, Dec 3,  I swallowed pill, complete with moisture-proof, clear hard plastic shipping container (almost 1′ square with 3 very sharp “points”), and shiny pull-off “cover”.
Spent Friday night in emergency room, with several too many x-rays trying to specify location of the almost 1” piece of very “pointy” hard plastic.
Medical people were sure it was foil so it would show up nicely in x-ray, but husband theorized that the flimsy cover was not foil but instead Mylar.
After 6hrs of failure they finally followed his suggestion and put the sample pill in its shipping packet (Boniva for next month osteoporosis) on the machine.
What they saw was very different from what they were expecting. So instead they gave my throat a CT scan and found the piece of pointy plastic.

The chunk was too large to remove in our small-town hospital, so I got medi-flight to a city about 2-1/2 hours drive (closer to more advanced “civilization”). Removed the hard plastic by 4pm  Saturday (((20 hours with that moisture-proof pack in my throat))) and Santa Rosa hospital discharged me about 5pm.  We got a motel and drove home on Sunday.

.

(Below is December Star for 2020)

Identify Cause and Strategies.
So, the point is to ask “What STRATEGIES can we put in place to avoid this happening again?”

1. Do not put pill in my pill holder until it has all extraneous material removed (wrapper, shipping container, etc).
2. Pills go into larger container BEFORE i swallow them, which forces me to actually LOOK at the pills before i put them in my mouth.
3. Since we had let our medi-Flight/ambulance MEMBERSHIP lapse, this cost will be tremendous (even with insurance).  We now have re-instated our very-reasonably priced medi-Flight and ambulance annual membership for the future.
4. Make sure we have grab-quick documents: Medical proof of insurance, medication Rx List, Power-of-Attorney for Health, etc

.

UPDATE: i needed an extension on antibiotics, and hope that within the next week my throat will begin healing enough to handle something other than very soft blender-foods.  … And we have now seen the cost for my helicopter ride (which is unbelievably high before insurance contributions – the cost of buying a house in fact !).  Praying that insurance pays most of these various costs for all the many many services provided during this emergency.

.

LINKS:

Disconnect for Cause/Effect by Truthful Kindness at >> https://truthfulkindness.com/2014/12/28/recent-disconnect-from-understanding-source-of-dissatisfaction/ ;

…

…

.* Admin issues: SHARE dementia awareness thru buttons below. Subscribe “FOLLOW” button is at the very bottom of the page, with “Category” Links, “Recent Posts” and “Archive”.  If you put your eMail address there you should get an eMail each time i write a blog entry.  Feel free to leave your thoughts in the form of comments, but please filter your comments with truthful loving kindness to all concerned. … *** …  If there is an advertisement below, I have no control over what is shown. My own full legal name is Truthful Loving Kindness. My current diagnosis is still Mild Cognitive Impairment, but my neurologist said I am in a unique position for helping because I have “one foot in each door”.  Text Copyright © Truthful L. Kindness on 10Dec2021.  Star picture by Truthful Kindness finished 07Dec2021.  Holly picture by Truthful Kindness finished 09Dec2021. Tags: behavior, cause and effect, confused, dementia, food, medication, person living with dementia, PLwD, strategy, symptoms .  S&S categ: confusion, food, medication.

 .