6-26-2022 It has been one year...

(Tricia)

It seems impossible to believe, but today marks exactly one year since I woke up to find Linda unresponsive and had to call 911. In the past year, Linda has been hospitalized seven times at five different hospitals, and she has undergone rehab at two skilled nursing facilities. She has had six bouts of C.diff. She has awakened from a coma, removed her own feeding tube (!), relearned to walk and talk, broken her hip, gone through two hip surgeries, suffered through and healed from a pressure ulcer, and was given less than two months to live by her doctors two months ago.

She might have lost ground from where she was before she broke her hip, but she’s still here, watching movies, eating pancakes, and giving us all a hard time when she wants to be left alone. Say what you will, she’s one tough individual! We can’t count on what the future will bring, but we most certainly can’t count her out.

And then there’s COVID. Ed and I are still in semi-quarantine in the back of the house, but we both feel much better. Yesterday, we ventured out to run errands for the first time. He had passed the five-day mark after the first onset of his symptoms and no longer had a cough or fever, which the CDC advises is the point at which he could interact with people again while wearing a mask. So he ran in to pick up breakfast from a nearby diner, as well as in a couple of stores for groceries, while I stayed in the car. Tomorrow or Tuesday, he is likely going back to work. Today is my five-day mark, but we will both still steer clear of Linda and the caregivers until at least next weekend, and stay masked for some time thereafter, just to be absolutely sure everything is safe.

I haven’t seen Linda at all since Tuesday, and I’m in the same house, which has been extremely strange! But she still has shown no symptoms, thank goodness. And she feels good enough to have refused having her blood sugar, blood pressure, and temperature checked yesterday morning. The caregiver called me from two rooms over so I could try to convince Linda to relent over speakerphone, just as I had to do occasionally for the nurses at the hospital. Seemed like old times. :-)

This has been such a remarkably tough year, but it has certainly been an enlightening one. These must be the “interesting times” the Chinese proverb is talking about! It’s difficult not knowing what’s coming or when, but we’ve learned a great deal about taking things day by day, and we’ve become far more comfortable with extreme uncertainty than we were last June, that’s for sure. Not to mention, we’ve learned that doctors who speak with absolute certainty are often just taking their best guess (or in some cases, their worst one), so we sometimes have to trust our own best judgment rather than theirs, as hard as that might be.

At the end of last year, my friend Sharon, who also was helping family members through difficult medical situations, remarked that she hoped 2022 would be better than 2021. That didn’t exactly happen! As Linda hits this one-year mark still grappling with a very complex health situation, I’ll hope that over the next 12 months, we can use what we have learned to more easily manage difficulties as they arise, find the resources we need as we need them, and work toward the best outcome possible.

And maintain our sense of humor! I’m sure we’re going to need that.