u/Creepy_Valuable6223

I have an 85 year old friend who is in a skilled nursing facility self-pay. It is a very good facility; the medical care seems solid. Except - they have now decided that they won't be giving him any more PT.

Having spent plenty time tending my aging parents, I can tell that he would definitely benefit from PT; he is now bed bound and keeping him from getting bedsores is a real project for them. He is nearly blind but quite cogent, and he desperately wants PT. He and his wife are willing to pay to have someone come in to provide it, but the facility won't allow that. Getting him to appointments in the outside world is nearly impossible, so he can't just be toted off somewhere else for PT.

I am finding that that is the system in all the skilled nursing facilities around here. They give little or no PT to their long term patients, and they won't allow anyone to be be hired to come in to do it. So he can't just move to another facility. His wife is 83 years old and has her own problems and does not feel able to arrange care for him at home. I can only visit him once a week due to the distance of his facility, and I'm hardly a PT expert so I can't do much directly myself.

They do not have kids; he has no relatives except an elderly sister in the Midwest, and her relatives are 1,500 miles away, so they don't have anyone to help them figure something out. He has a "concierge" doctor who has no interest in the matter and who lets the facility doctor make all decisions.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

(I realize that my friend is not my biological parent, but I am trying to give him the sort of help that I would have wanted my father to have if I hadn't been able to give it.)

In early January I started to have chest pain in my sternum. It was worst, stabbing, when something especially upset me. I was dealing with a truly horrible family medical situation so I figured it was stress and ignored it.

A week passed and I went to urgent care for something else. I mentioned the ongoing chest pain to the GP and she insisted on an EKG; it was fine.

Another week passed and the pain was still there and I got a tele doc appointment. Because I have cardiac calcification (I'm GenX), the doctor insisted I go to the ER. I did. EKG, chest x ray and blood work were all fine. Later I had a treadmill test, it was fine.

Three months later it was still painful. It is often in the sternum but also sometimes higher up across my chest, or even along the bra line. I went to a GP who thinks it may be costochondritis (which was my guess), but she mentioned the possibility of a chest CT scan. I hate medical tests and hate medicalizing things. What are the odds that this is something extra horrible (rather than costo, which is of course miserable, but I can ignore miserable)? She told me to try taking ibuprofen to see if it helped, but because it comes and goes on its own so much I couldn't tell by trying it.

I think maybe I initially caused it by spending many hours a day for a couple of years in a terrible chair, and also picking up my 50+ pound dogs (I stopped doing both things a couple of weeks ago with no real improvement). Or maybe it was my bra (but now both wearing a bra, and not wearing a bra, are both bad). And it was worsened by stress. I'm not sure whether to have more tests or hope it just goes away.