Wednesday, July 15, 2015

5 July 2015 Hike with Mike finale

1

The months from March to July have been heavily weighted toward the hope of acquiring a new neurologist to help me manage Parkinson's. The contract neurologist at moutain home quit providing consultant services and the VA's back up (hiring outside physicians and paying for vets to be see) kicked in. Highly unsatisfactory. I arrived at the appropriate office, already a month behind schedule and needing new scripts for my meds. What I got for VA's money was a referral to a university clinic 5 hours distant that would not see me until next January. I tried to tell him that I could not schedule the appointment – VA has to approve that expense. He told me to come see him after I was seen in the Vanderbilt clinic.
I wasted no time in contacting my primary care doc. I am not about to let some LMD throw me into a university clinic that would take a year to repeat a diagnosis and then lose my records in their system. I hope I've opened a shit storm over this. If not, I fully intend to. VA has its own movement disorder consortium and I can telemed that clinic. We'll see what happens.

Tremendous fatigue has set in, paire with sleep ditsturbance. Makes it hard to anything some days and difficult on many others

My daily hikes with my down stream neighbor, Mike, have ended. We set out as usual about 0900 last wednesday, 8 july. 0.3 miles down the road he simply fell over backwards, no pulse, no respirations, no motion, no words. I was about 3 steps in front of him when I eard the noise his head made when it hit the pavement. Complicating the scene, it was at a sharp curve in the road and the side we were on was overgrown with weeds so that remaining where he fell would have put us both under the wheels of the first vehicle coming our way.

I managed to flag a car, get the driver to drive to a point with cell service and call 911. The she flagged traffic. I did the first response things, airway, pre-cordial thump. Nothing worked. He was dead when he fell over. EMS arrive in about 10-14 minutes and lined and shocked him before tranporting him 28 miles to Johnson City. He was pronounced there. I had one contact number for his business partner. Called that number and intiated the cascade. Memorial service Saturday


Rather a bummer of a week.

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