UTI... again

i got the panicked call at 2:30 pm on Friday while I was in the middle of a meeting.  It was my mom telling me she had a "roaring" UTI and needed me to take her to the ER. She's had them before, including a couple this summer.  I took her to urgent care each time.  Urinary tract infections are not hospital-worthy and the emergency department is the last place you want to be for any reason. I told her I was in a meeting and, even if I wasn't, I was 20 miles away at work. I texted my husband to ask him to bring her to urgent care. No response. I tried again about 10 minutes later. Still no response. Grrrr.

The meeting ended and I called her to say she'd just have to wait until I got home. There were no appointments available, so we'd be walk-ins. I called hubby (or he called me, I don't remember now) and he said he'd been doing something in the basement and hadn't heard/felt the texts come through. (A likely story.) Regardless, he didn't want to take her to urgent care because he "can't get sick." (Oh yeah, but I can.) He asked if she could handle going in by herself and he'd wait in the car. I told him to forget it.

I went straight to her house after work and brought her to urgent care. She gave her urine sample and then we waited. And waited. And waited. There weren't that many people there but it was more than 2 hours before she was called back. The doctor-like person* (she only introduced herself as Debbie) finally came in. Apparently, she hadn't looked at my mom's chart because she blurted out the name of some antibiotic ending in "mycin" that she was going to prescribe. I told Debbie that my mom had recently had two UTIs (both were caused by e. coli) and Bactrim was what finally knocked them out. I also asked if this -mycin med was related to erythromycin, which my mom is allergic to. I was assured that the computer would flag it if she couldn't take it.

Eventually, another doctor-like person who Debbie forgot to introduce came in to tell us that they were prescribing Bactrim. The computer didn't flag the other med but they looked it up outside of the system and, lo and behold, it's related to erythromycin! We picked up the Bactrim at the pharmacy and I brought her home. It was pushing 9:00 pm at that point and I hadn't been home since 8:00 am, nor had I eaten anything since lunch.

My husband has now justified not bringing her by noting that he doesn't know what she's allergic to, so it's a good thing I brought her. How nice that he now has that excuse. If he'd brought her at 2:30, I'm sure they would've been in and out in no time and might've had a different provider who was on the ball.

I feel so alone. I know she's my mother, not his, but not being able to rely on someone else even for something relatively easy is demoralizing. 

*The after visit summary showed that Debbie is an APN, by the way. Mystery solved.