Home Care

With the dignity it offers patients as well as its cost-effectiveness, home care is the vanguard of health care, Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon and local nurses said at a Valley College rally Friday. From blood transfusions to dressing changes, more and more care for terminal and chronic illness is given in patients' residence, said Gina Aguirre, chairwoman of Valley College's health sciences department.

We "children" were older than 60 when Dad became seriously ill with Alzheimer's disease. My friend was in her 50s when her husband evidenced the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Another friend was deep in her 70s when her longtime companion suffered the immobilizing effects of an earlier devastation of childhood polio.

A thin, almost nervous, smile crossed the face of David Reyes as he held out his left arm to nurse Karen Wilson, who knelt before him while preparing an array of syringes and swabs on the coffee table. Working intently on her 39-year-old AIDS patient, Wilson cleaned and sterilized an implanted intravenous feeding tube that ran from an artery in his forearm to his aorta, the main artery to the heart. She quickly drew a vial of fresh blood. "How's your digestion? Have you been running a temperature?"

Irene Steinlage has trouble walking, getting dressed, making her bed, taking a bath. She has stayed in her Folsom home with the help of a health aide, one that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says the state can no longer afford. The governor's plan to take away such care is meant to save money. But it could end up costing California more by forcing the 85-year-old, who has Parkinson's, osteoporosis and other ailments -- and thousands like her -- into nursing homes.

A jury on Tuesday found the manager of a private home care center blameless in the brutal stabbing of a mentally disabled woman by a psychotic fellow resident at the Santa Ana facility. Refuting charges of negligence against the home's management for failing to anticipate and prevent the attack in 1982, the Santa Ana Superior Court jury refused to award any damages to Gayle A. Bohmert, 33, who is now living in Missouri.

Unqualified entrepreneurs are swarming into the home health-care business to reap potentially vast profits from the Medicare program, and the government is unlikely to stem the tide of fraud and abuse any time soon, according to federal investigators.

The state Supreme Court has ruled that a Contra Costa County woman who promised to take care of her ill husband was only doing her duty and is not entitled to part of his property. The court denied a new hearing sought by the woman, who said she was promised a substantial share her husband's multimillion-dollar estate if she took personal care of him during his illness.

Gov. Jerry Brown and top Democratic lawmakers announced Thursday that they had reached a deal on state spending. Here are some key elements of the budget agreement: Social services Spending on welfare, child care and home care for the elderly and disabled would be reduced. There would be stricter requirements and time limits placed on welfare recipients, but those close to finishing job-training programs could get exemptions. Monthly welfare checks would not be reduced.

Sick and frail, John Stewart, 77, can hardly get around anymore. Five strokes have left him partially paralyzed, and radiation therapy on a cancerous tumor has made him thin and pale. Stewart's daughter, Judy, considered placing him in a convalescent hospital. But after visiting one of the facilities, Stewart decided it was best to keep her father at home, even though it meant changing her life drastically. And she is not alone.