Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 19, 1994 TAG: 9401190090
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURA WILLIAMSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Tuesday, she ran out of the small, plastic adapters she needs to make the intravenous line work. Still fighting a painful infection in her leg, the 29-year-old physical therapist called her home-care nurse at Caremark.
But with the icy remnants of Monday's winter storm still coating the roads, Carpentieri's intravenous specialist, Martha Crush, feared she, too, might be homebound Tuesday. So she told Carpentieri how to rig a replacement for the adapter and hoped it would do the job.
Luckily, it didn't have to. Another nurse - one with a four-wheel-drive vehicle - offered Crush a ride to the house in Old Southwest where Carpentieri was staying with a friend.
Home-care nurses all over Roanoke and Southwest Virginia are scrambling this week to get to their patients, hitching rides with co-workers, risking their own safety to drive on treacherous roads and offering telephone advice when they absolutely can't get there.
"It's been a very challenging time," said Linda Hudgins, a senior public health nurse at the Roanoke Health Department.
The Health Department - which serves 69 homebound patients all over the Roanoke Valley - sent none of its nurses out Tuesday. That meant that patients needing intravenous medications, insulin shots, wound dressings and other services simply didn't get them.
Because they feared bad driving conditions Tuesday, Health Department nurses laid heavier dressings on wounds Monday and prepared extra insulin shots for patients to administer themselves, Hudgins said.
"We can't do that but for so long," she said. Today "we will have to get there."
Other home health-care companies fared better Tuesday.
Jim Lake, administrator for Temporary Health Care in Radford, picked up two of his aides in Pulaski County and drove them to the homes of two quadriplegics in Radford.
"They have to be seen, or else they're going to lay in bed all day long with nothing to eat," he said. "They are our first priority."
Those further down the priority list don't always get seen when ice and snow make driving difficult, however. Lake said his company has a priority list of patients and tries to get to those that need the most help.
Temporary Health Care and its sister company, Arcadia Health Care, visit more than 100 patients at home, he said. But three offices - in Radford, Salem and Check - must serve 10 surrounding counties, many of them accessible only by ill-maintained country roads.
Caremark, which provides intravenous antibiotics, chemotherapy and services to women who must stay at home because of high-risk pregnancies, serves patients as far away as Harrisonburg and Bristol, District Manager Barry Mobley said.
Staff members carry battery-powered equipment in case patients lose electricity, he said.
Nurses at Carilion's Home Health Services often take medical equipment home with them the night before when they expect bad weather, public relations specialist Sally Ramey said.
That way, they save themselves a trip to the office and can visit the patients that live nearest to them, she said.
And, like other home health-care services in the area, they often cut back on services when driving becomes difficult. But they never stop services to patients with critical needs.
"We absolutely get somebody there," Ramey said. "Somehow."
by CNB