Uneasy

It has been 4 weeks since Don came back to the care home from the hospital.

He is… okay. Sleeping a lot which is fine because pneumonia wipes out people a quarter his age. But what is missing is his smile.

He is worse now than in the hospital in terms of happiness. His bubbly jokey nature – that which convinced me he was enjoying life despite all and should be saved to continue –  has not returned yet. He seems to have left it in the hospital, where he was quite happy, treating it all as a great adventure, after he regained consciousness.

His floor of the care home is just coming off 3 weeks shutdown for an outbreak of parainfluenza. Maybe when recreation starts again this week it will help. Right now the wing feels like it is occupied by ghosts, drifting around. It is, if i let myself think, ghastly.

I summarize the med info by saying it causes croup in the young and pneumonia in the old.

Is that what he had? No one knows and no one as far as i know is asking.

But i am. I am shaken by my lack of trust. I am hovering over the LPNs: Did you check his oxygen, did you check his chest? They oblige, but all seems fine, except his missing smile.

What we can’t check is his spirit, and i am fearful it may be broken.

I think i will try to move him to a different facility with better dementia care, but he may not make it through the waiting list.

Tomorrow i go back into the land of Island Health bureaucracy, not for a social cause, but to desperately try to give my love some ease.