Primrose 43 Signs Off
2020 wasn’t my favorite year ever with earthquakes, fires, floods and then the appearance of the dreaded Covid-19 virus. Suddenly we had to stay home all the time and learned a new term, “social distancing”. If we had to go out, we were encouraged to wear masks. People lost jobs, businesses closed, school ended two months early. Still, we congratulated ourselves on being able to endure life better than many. Because we were retired, we didn’t worry about jobs and income. We didn’t have children in school, so we didn’t have to take on home schooling with everything else. It was certainly an inconvenience, but not a large crisis in our lives.
When we started social distancing in March, little was known about how the virus was spread or how it was best treated. We were used to running errands whenever we wanted, but now tried our best to find other ways to do things. We ordered our groceries online from the local grocery store and picked them up in the parking lot. We tried to adjust to shopping online for other things, too.
I kept two lists on the kitchen counter; one for items we needed to buy and one of projects to be done. I tried to put household projects on the list a few at a time. We planted and weeded the garden. We picked the strawberries, We painted the shed. We started a long term project of clearing out the herb garden because it was becoming too much for me to take care of.
One day we drove to the family cabin near Mantua where we did a socially distanced hike with my sister and brother-in-law, Eileen and Clark. Another day we stopped by the cabin to visit and found Eileen and Clark digging up a hawthorn tree or bush. Roger started helping with it and started chopping away at it with a dull chain saw and a shovel. While digging, he lost his balance and ended up on his back on the ground. He got right up and started working again.
When summer came, working outside was more pleasant in the morning before it got too hot. I wanted to dig up a pot of lemon balm for a friend, but I couldn’t get it out, so I went to my usual source for help. He had already gone out walking earlier that morning and was relaxing by watching some sort of documentary in his recliner, but paused it so he could come out and help me. After looking over the situation, he went to the shed and came back with a shovel. The plant was actually in a plastic five gallon bucket we had sunk down into the ground, so he had to slip the edge of the shovel blade down the inside of the bucket before jumping on it to push it down further.
Have you ever tried one of those exercises where an event happens and different people are interviewed to find out what they observed? Everyone observes something different. It’s harder than it looks, just because it is so unexpected.
It happened so quickly. I thought I saw him jump on the shovel. I heard a popping sound and then he fell, his body curved around the shovel like a comma. In my memory, it is like a short video that plays over and over in my mind. He landed with his shoulders and head on the sidewalk, but I couldn’t tell where he hit.
He might have been knocked out briefly, but I don’t even know that. I asked if he was okay, but when he tried to say something to me, it seemed like his tongue was too thick to speak clearly. He tried to get up a couple of times, but I urged him to rest there a bit as I was afraid if he got up, he’d fall and really hurt himself.
I debated whether I should call for help. If it was like his fall a few weeks earlier, he’d likely be unhappy that I called 911, but when I pulled my phone out, he didn’t object. As I talked to the dispatcher he looked so uncomfortable there, that I ran into the house and grabbed a pillow and quilt from the couch. He raised his head so I could slip the pillow under him. As we waited for the ambulance, a few raindrops started to fall, so I ran into the garage and got an umbrella out and put it over him to shield him.
Shortly before the ambulance arrived he turned himself onto his right side. His arms were still clinched up near his chest….and they shook as if he was having a small seizure. As the EMTs came, he was nauseated and had huge drops of sweat all over his face.
Months later this is still the movie I see over and over in my mind as he falls over and over. I start to second guess myself. I shouldn’t have asked him to dig up that plant. I should have stood behind him. I should have called for help without waiting a few minutes.
It seemed like forever for help to arrive, but really it was just 12 minutes. It was Wednesday morning, so one of the neighbor kids was mowing our park strip. The EMT who got out first suggested she go mow somewhere else so they could hear.
While one EMT started to check him out, the other asked me what had happened. He wanted to know if I wanted them to just check him out or if I wanted them to transport him. I was a bit surprised by that question. Why would I call them if I didn’t want them to transport him? Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him respond once to the EMT, but after that he stopped making any sounds.
They loaded him up and took him away while my neighbor tried to console me by telling me some less ominous things it could be. I gathered up my things and went to the hospital. I was hopeful.
At the hospital I quickly parked in the lot nearest the emergency department but was stopped at the door to use hand sanitizer and have my temperature taken because the hospital was locked down due to the pandemic.
A lady was walking down the hall toward me, asking for me by name. She introduced herself as a hospital social worker as she showed me into a small waiting room. I said, “oh, this is bad!” I remembered this scene from 1996 when I walked into Providence Hospital in Anchorage, when we were ushered into a similar small room….only to be met by a hospital chaplain, who told us my father-in-law had died.
Still I hoped.
The social worker said I could go back in a few minutes, but right now there were so many people in the room working on him and then he had to go have a CT scan. As I was hearing these things, my optimistic nature was thinking that he had endured so many things and always popped back. He had four heart attacks of various strengths due to his exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam, resulting in four stents and finally double bypass surgery from 1998-2013
Eventually she returned to take me to see him. Before I could enter the room I was swathed in an enormous yellow paper gown and a mask. She urged me to move closer. I wanted to stay out of the way for all the people taking care of him, but then she said a most horrifying thing, “Go talk to him. They say hearing is the last thing to go.” The last thing?
After just a few minutes by his side, the ER doctor asked me to sit down with him.
“I’m sorry I have to be so blunt, but you need to make a decision, and you need to make it quickly. Life Flight has already been called and they are only one minute out, so you have to decide what to do in that one minute.” Life Flight? That is for critically ill people! “He has a skull fracture and internal bleeding in his head. If he stays here he WILL die. If he goes to McKay-Dee, the neurosurgeon there could operate possibly depending on what he finds. If they do surgery, he could be impaired.”
How do you decide something like that? I understood the urgency. I thought how hard he worked to be healthy after all his heart problems…exercising and changing his diet. He had said many times, when he died he hoped to go in the blink of an eye. He was horrified at the thought of being impaired so someone else would have to take care of him. Was I being selfish in wanting them to fix him? To give him a chance?
The room suddenly filled with the Life Flight people. There was no time left, so I agreed to have him transported. Before I knew what was happening, we were out the door of the emergency room, running and rolling him down the sidewalk and across the road to the Life Flight helicopter. It was so small! How could they all fit? They put him in first, having to turn him 90 degrees, then pushed me close to the door to tell him goodbye. Was it goodbye until later or was it really goodbye for good? The flight nurse wrote down my phone number and promised to call when they landed. I felt a giant hole inside as they lifted off.
The doctor had told me if they did surgery they wouldn’t know how successful it would be for at least 72 hours, so I hurried home and grabbed enough clothes to last me for three days. I couldn’t leave the house because the phone kept ringing. First a social worker from McKay-Dee called to ask some questions, then the flight nurse called to let me know they were safely in Ogden. Of course, I was also trying to update the children. Then neurosurgeon #1 called, followed minutes later by neurosurgeon #2. They were united in their opinion. Nothing could be done. There would be no miracle surgery. There would be no bouncing back. They agreed to keep him under observation until the inevitable happened, so by the time I left the house, I already knew the ending.
When I arrived at McKay-Dee he had been moved to the ICU. Two of the children were there. The other three were on their way, but had further to travel. The goal was to help him stay with us until the children could get there to say goodbye, but even that couldn’t happen. Because of restriction caused by Covid-19, the maximum amount of visitors to a patient was four, and only two at a time. We have five children. Counting me, that was six potential visitors. On top of everything else, they wanted me to choose which two of my children would not be allowed to tell their father goodbye!
Knowing our situation, the nurses were kind, asking if there was any way they could help us. The one help I wanted couldn’t be given. When they asked again, I told them they couldn’t help because of the limit on visitors, but I so wanted him to have a blessing. The nurse said she would look into it. When she left the room, the doctor told me that if she couldn’t make it happen, he and the next doctor coming on duty would do it, for which I was most grateful. It wasn’t long before the nurse brought in a CNA and a hospital security guard who gave him a blessing.
Perhaps that is why the hard choice was removed from me. It was shortly after that the nurse came in and said his blood pressure and heart rate were unstable; that sometimes that meant the patient was ‘transitioning’. They had the monitors in his room turned off so we couldn’t see them, but they were monitoring him from the hall just outside his room. Just as the nurse finished what she was saying I saw her glance at the hall and say, “Oh!” The doctor hurried into the room and took his pulse, then looked at the nurse and said, “time of death, 18:45.”
Blaine hadn’t made it to Las Vegas yet. Bethany and her family were somewhere in Wyoming. Kathleen’s flight wasn’t until the next morning.
Maybe it was the blessing or maybe it was just meant to be. I didn’t have to choose who could see him. Instead he just peacefully slipped away…about the closest thing to the blink of an eye that could be imagined. Primrose 43 signed off for the last time.
