Editor’s note: Northampton resident Marc Warner wrote this essay about a week before his stepmother, Lucille, died peacefully in a nursing home on April 19. She had tested positive for COVID-19. Marc continues to be free of coronavirus symptoms.
Look real close at the latest data. Closer. Over there. Hampshire County. You see that new case in Northampton?
I brought it.
On Thursday, April 9, I drove to New York to get my 96-year-old stepmother, Lucille, out of the Manhattan rehab center where she’s been for a month since her fall and a broken bone by her hip on March 3.
She hadn’t had a lot of life in her before her fall. This former bon vivant had outlived her husband, most of her friends, and had swapped her life about town for a life about three rooms. She slept 21 hours a day, seemed to live mostly on coffee, and hadn’t left her apartment for at least a year and a half.
It was hard to get information from the rehab center. The facility went into coronavirus lockdown mode soon after Lucille arrived. The facility did notify me about a coronavirus case on the 14th floor, but Lucille was on the seventh, unaffected, and the staff was taking great precautions to keep the facility virus-free.
They also conveyed the sense that Lucille was not a motivated patient. There was no “rehab” going on; she refused to walk more than a few feet and the staff relented and let her go back to bed.
She was comfortable — or at least not uncomfortable. But given the ineffectiveness of rehab, the inability to visit, and the worsening situation in New York, it seemed reasonable to bring her up to Northampton — to our home and from there to a nearby nursing home if she needed more care than we could muster.
So at 2:30 p.m. on that Thursday, a helper from the center and I scooted her from a wheelchair and onto a mattress in the back of my van. A couple of howls during the transition, but then she slept for the whole trafficless drive to Northampton.
She did not, however, want to go any further. She screamed in apparent pain at all my attempts to hoist her with and without the mattress out of the van. My wife Bonnie joined the effort and applied her teacher skills to sternly lay down the rules as if to an off-task 10 year old. “Lucille, we’re going to move you. No yelling.”
I was in awe.
Alas, it didn’t work. We never got more than half of her out of the van before our mortification at the fact that the whole neighborhood could hear someone yelling “Marc, leave me” prompted us to abort and slide her back in the van.
It was also dawning on us that getting her out of the van might be just the start of our problems. Lucille was in pain and she seemed to need a lot more care than we’d realized. She couldn’t walk to the bathroom. She couldn’t seem to sit up. Could we handle this?
My doubts — and the more immediate need to get her out of the van — prompted my call to the admissions person at the nearby nursing home that I’d been in touch with a few times over the last few weeks. Would she be able to admit Lucille sooner rather than later?
The woman couldn’t have been more understanding or kinder over the phone, but no, she couldn’t allow me to just drive Lucille over and let her staff take her from there. The paperwork needed to be done, and she couldn’t open her facility to a New York transplant with the consequent risk of coronavirus.
At a loss of where to turn next, I called the city’s non-emergency line. Five minutes later, two masked EMTs were in my driveway. Fifteen minutes later, they added full Tyvek suits to their masks and proceeded to get her out of the van and into an ambulance for a trip to Cooley Dickinson Hospital.
Half way into the effort, though, they suddenly stopped, with one of the EMT’s asking excitedly, “Did you see that?!” I had not. He and his partner then said in unison, “look on the roof.” A bizarre sight: a falcon had swooped down and perched just above us.
I could not accompany the ambulance because the hospital is closed to visitors, but we did have a series of quick calls. Yes, I’m her health care proxy. No, she has no underlying medical conditions other than recovering from the broken bone by her hip. Yes, I would like her next — and final — move to be to a local nursing home.
And two hours after that, a doctor at the hospital called again to tell me that she tested positive for coronavirus.
Oh Lordy. What have I done? I assured the doctor that I’d had absolutely no sense that she might have the disease, and that I was so sorry for bringing this to Northampton and Cooley Dickinson.
Next bombshell: I have to self-isolate immediately. Within five minutes a nurse from the city health department called to confirm that I had done that.
I had, and I write this now in day three of my isolation in our bedroom. Bonnie sleeps on the couch downstairs, and I am again in awe (and thankful) for her immediate decision Thursday to banish me to the bedroom and not to the garage.
Which brings us to now. I feel fine. If there are little covids floating inside of me, they have yet to mount a noticeable attack. I’m getting work done, I have a nice springtime view out the window, I have good meals delivered on a tray outside the bedroom door.
Bonnie cancelled the annual backyard Easter egg hunt for the boys. She instead went for quality over quantity courtesy of curbside pick up of chocolates from Richardsons. Two were on my breakfast tray this morning.
As for Lucille, I wished her happy birthday by FaceTime this morning, and let her know that she’s led a wonderful 97 years, that I’m thankful for the influence she’s had on me, and that I promise the next move will be her last.
Honestly, I’m not sure she heard a word of it. I actually thought she might already be dead, and the response by the nurse orchestrating the call suggested that she thought so too. But then Lucille opened her eyes, and I got to wave before the nurse ended the call.
I suspect it will be my last call with her. The hospital plan is “focusing on comfort”; i.e., she receives no medical care or diagnostics other than a second COVID-19 test to see if she is still positive. She is.
The hospital does not have a hospice unit, and the hospital staff has said they can only keep her until Monday. She cannot go to the nursing home I had hoped to take her because of the coronavirus. She might go to a nursing home in East Longmeadow if they can open their planned coronavirus ward this weekend. Otherwise, I don’t know. A room in one of the motels on Route 5? If all else fails, we’ll take her here.
And that’s today’s “captive’s log” from Northampton.
I hope you’re well!
Marc Warner lives in Northampton.