My 86-year-old mother is scheduled for spinal surgery next Monday (6/22). For the past year, she has been experiencing increasing pain and difficulty getting around and it is our hope that this surgery will produce improvement in her condition. Just in the past month she has gone from walking slowly and with some pain to barely hobbling along. The printed instructions she received for pre-surgical preparation included instructions to take a shower the night before her surgery and again in the morning before being admitted to the hospital. I’m assuming these are boilerplate instructions with no attempt at customization, but I’m wondering if any of our resident doctors could back me up in trying to convince her NOT to attempt a shower before her surgery. Her bathtub is not equipped with anything more than a wall-mounted handhold. There is no built-in seat, and I don’t believe the bottom has a non-slip surface. She has been avoiding showers for a while now, getting by instead with a washcloth at the sink. But now she’s convinced that if she doesn’t take a shower the morning of her surgery, she will be turned away and her surgery will be postponed or cancelled. I’m also trying to contact her surgeon’s office but I know the people here are a lot quicker to respond. Any advice or information would be very welcome.
You can get a plastic seat at any medical supply store. Buy a slip-proof mat for the tub. She should have that anyway, whether she’s having surgery or not IMHO.
My guess, as a complete non-medical person is that they are just making sure she is clean. Why two showers in 24 hours is a mystery to me as well. You have until next Monday; surely the surgeon’s office will answer by then.
I’ll look into the possibility of getting a seat. However, my own experience with slip-proof mats convinces me that they’re far from a good bet. I bought one for my own shower and discovered that if the water backed up at all in the tub (which it often does when the plumbing is a bit old), the mat FLOATED on top of the water and hydroplaned! The tiny suction cups that were supposed to make it stick to the surface of the tub were useless. I’ve also tried the cute little decals that you can apply to the bottom of the tub. Maybe my technique is poor, but those decals quickly began to curl up at the edges to create a tripping hazard.
But thanks for a quick answer. I’m just stressing out that my mother is going to slip and fall in the tub before she can get the surgery that’s supposed to help her.
You can probably arrange with the hospital to come there early that morning, so she can take a shower there, where the shower will have all the safety devices installed.
The purpose is to make sure that she’s clean. After all, the doctors can sanitize everything in the surgical room except for the patient. That’s always struck me as odd.
I suspect a washcloth or sponge bath would do the job.
As for the floating bathmat… that can happen in two situations (in my experience) and both have to do with poor adhesion for the suction cups. Soap scum will do it, and so will a shower/tub enclosure that already has a rough texture. My dislike of bathmats comes from managing apartments and seeing what grows under those things if you don’t pull them up every now and then.
Perhaps someone can help her with a sponge bath in a chair or in a bed.
They’d obviously like her to be clean but it won’t be a make or break.
I suspect if they thought she needed to be cleaner they’d assign someone that task in the holding area rather than cancel the surgery…I understand the concern of the elderly in following instructions. It would be nice if everyone followed them more carefully.*
It’s unlikely her physician will want her to risk injury by following the technical details of a boilerplate instruction set.
*In one of my favorite pre-op stories, an anxious guy asked the nurse if he could drink alcohol the night before his vasectomy. “No problem,” she told him. “It’s just done under local.” He showed up too drunk to walk straight and they rescheduled.
It is of extreme importance that the patient is clean prior to all surgeries–spinal surgeries above all. IANAD, but an RN.