Saturday, May 31, 2025

Hiding your eyes won't make it go away

 

And here we are on the cusp of June, with another month having flown by -- in some parts of the world, May 2025 is already history -- and I'm just under the wire to keep my nearly 19-year-old commitment to posting at least once every month. As usual, my lack of attention to this Whirled is not due to a paucity of material; on the contrary, there's entirely too much potentially blogworthy stuff whirling around me, to the point where I could pluck just about any item from that ever-growing list and turn it into a reasonably well-thought out rant.

But my focus has been elsewhere as I continue to adjust to life after losing Ron. A week ago today, the 24th, marked the three-month anniversary of his death, and the grief always seems to hit hardest on anniversaries. Today wasn't an anniversary, but the sad hit me anew when I was out on the back deck this morning, looking at the sturdy work bench that Ron had built, as well as a smaller table that he had fashioned from a door. The latter served as our coffee table for years, and then it became a piece of outdoor furniture, which is now badly in need of refinishing.

Ron built and otherwise created so many beautiful things in his life, and as I thought about that I became overwhelmed again by his absence. So I sat down and bawled my eyes out for a while, and then finally got up and cleaned up a pungent pile of dog poop that my ancient hound Roxanne had thoughtfully deposited on the deck earlier.

Story of my life, lately: there's crying to be done, and then more shit to be dealt with.

Momentary escapes
I will say that the emotions around last week's anniversary were somewhat mitigated by the fact that my best friend drove all the way out to my hideaway behind the Pine Curtain and whisked me and my little dog Dobby off to her and her husband's lovely home in the Hill Country for the Memorial Day weekend. Not only did Dobby and I get to spend time with someone we dearly love, but I also fell in love with the Hill Country all over again. I mean, really in love. It's not the most verdant part of Texas, but it has a wild beauty of its own that even the egregious over-development hasn't yet destroyed.

And as a bonus, my friend and I got to meet her new neighbor, who is a bibliophile and animal lover like we are, and has also been recently widowed and knows exactly what I'm going through.

It wasn't the first time that my bestie had rescued me for a holiday; previously I'd spent the Easter weekend with my friend and her delightful family at their other home in my former neck of the (literal) woods, aka The Edge of Nowhere. The graphic above was created from a picture I snapped on one of my friend's artfully designed wooded trails that weekend.

Those two interludes were a most welcome respite and they renewed my strength. But there's still so much to deal with -- practical matters as well as things that are brewing just beneath the surface, such as unanswered questions about Ron's death that haunt me.

What dreams may come...
I haven't had a lot of dreams about Ron since he's been gone, at least that I can remember. This may change as time goes by; I've lost very close loved ones before -- my dad, my mom, my sister -- and my dreams about them after their deaths have all followed different schedules. I do wake up many mornings with vague impressions that Ron was flickering in and out of my dreams, but rarely has there been a dream that left a lasting impression.

There was, however, one particularly vivid dream that I experienced shortly after I returned from my Easter weekend in the magical forest. I hadn't spoken of the dream to anyone until last week when I told my best friend about it. It was so real and so haunting that it has taken some time for me to process it.

First, some context. I haven't publicly written about Ron's medical journey in a great deal of detail; I'm saving that for the Substack or new blog that is still in the planning stages. But I have mentioned here and on my Facebook timeline that he developed some very puzzling medical problems in the last few weeks of his life.

Although his brain was messed up from the Lewy body dementia, and he had lost a lot of weight for reasons that his care teams were never able to figure out even after a battery of lab tests and X-rays and scans (oh, my!), he was otherwise still quite vigorously healthy. (He usually had a hearty appetite, so his weight loss didn't seem to be caused by inadequate caloric intake.) And he was strong -- too strong, as I found out in some truly frightening ways -- and also very, very mobile.

But he was a very mobile person with no place to go, and that was a source of unending frustration for him. As I've also mentioned, he was constantly trying to find ways to escape from his various places of confinement, first from the VA hospital, where he actually broke a hospital window one day (fortunately nobody was injured), and later from the locked memory care unit at the VA-approved nursing home. In both places, he kept the staff on their toes, and that's an understatement.

Most of the time, however, even in those later months, he was affable and actually tried to be helpful to the staff and to his fellow patients/residents, according to what I was told by various staffers and providers to whom I spoke. When he wasn't creating mayhem he was a model resident. But his violent episodes became more frequent; he tried to attack fellow residents as well as staff a few times, and had to be "redirected" and/or medicated. Sometimes I was notified about these incidents just after they occurred; other times I wasn't and only found out about them later.

Then things took a much more serious turn on January 20, a day that will live in infamy not only because of what happened to America, but also because of what happened with Ron.

On that morning, a nursing home staffer called me to get my permission for them to give Ron a vaccination against RSV, which was making the rounds of the nursing homes and could have made him extremely ill if he contracted the disease. I gave my consent for the vaccine, but I never found out whether or not he actually got it, because a few hours later I got another call from the nursing home about something else entirely.

Ron had had a particularly violent episode, and the nursing home staff had determined that they could not handle it there, so they had him transported and admitted to a "behavioral hospital" -- a mental institution -- in Pasadena, Texas, the same city where the nursing home is located.

This was all done before I was notified, and I didn't have a chance to try to get him taken back to his original care center, the VA hospital in Houston. I never was able to find out why he wasn't taken there; perhaps the beds were all full. In any case, he was at the behavioral hospital for a little over two weeks.

I was not able to visit him there, because I had no transportation and their visiting hours didn't sync with the schedule for the free VA shuttle, which I had been taking when going to visit him. But I did try to keep in close communication with the staff about what was going on. As had been the case at the VA and the nursing home, Ron was, according to numerous conversations with staff, very mobile and a definite "elopement" risk.

He was finally discharged from that hospital and sent back to the nursing home on February 6. And the very next day one of the nurses called me and said he had been  found in his room that morning, having apparently fallen when trying to get out of bed, and being unable to get back up. But he was okay, I was told. He just needed to get his strength back, I was assured. Residents sometimes needed a period of adjustment when returning from the "behavioral hospital." Probably nothing to worry about.

But then later on that day, another staffer called and told me that he had fallen out of his wheelchair when trying to stand up, and had hit his head and sustained a hematoma. It wasn't necessarily serious but they wanted to err on the side of caution, so they sent him to another hospital, also in Pasadena.

Wait, what? Wheelchair?!?

Yep. According to the nursing home staff member, Ron had been unable to walk or even stand up on his own after he got back from the behavioral hospital. Nobody seemed to know why.

Ron was at the other hospital overnight, but discharged the next day after X-rays and scans had indicated there was nothing to worry about.

Things went downhill from there. On Valentine's Day, a staffer called me and wanted to talk about hospice care. I was shocked. Hospice care?!? The woman tried to be reassuring, saying, "It's just another level of care that he will receive here." I consented to having a phone conference about it, scheduled for a few days hence.

But on February 16, before we had a chance to have the conference, Ron was found unresponsive in his bed, and the nursing home sent him back to the hospital they'd sent him to when he sustained the hematoma -- and it was an E.R. doctor at the hospital who actually called me, and that was to get consent for intubation. The nursing home did not call me: I called them as soon as I got off the phone with the E.R. doc, and listened to sincere apologies for the fact that they had been so busy getting Ron the emergency care he needed that they simply hadn't yet had time to call me, but it was on their to-do list.

Ron was at that hospital for nearly a week this time, during which I spent days and nights at his bedside, helplessly watching my unconscious husband struggle under the agony of intubation, an agony that the fentanyl they were pumping into his system couldn't entirely relieve. (I hadn't really known anything about intubation before that).

Even after he was extubated he was still clearly in pain, but morphine saved the day, though I had to get a little adamant in my request for it. Soon after the first infusion his pained face relaxed, and he even opened his eyes and looked at me a few times. I still saw love there, behind the nearly impenetrable fog, but I knew that he wasn't coming back from this, so I signed him up for hospice care.

Following that, he was discharged back to the nursing home, where he died on February 24.

The question remained: What had happened to him at the behavioral hospital that had accelerated his physical decline? They did change his meds, so clues to the mystery might very well be there. In any case, I have a bunch of questions that I haven't yet had time to pursue.

But Ron, or the dream fairy, or perhaps just my own troubled mind, won't let me forget this matter.

"Find out what happened..."
In the dream I had shortly after Easter, I was visiting Ron at some sort of medical facility. It wasn't any of the places where I had visited him in real life: not the VA hospital, or the nursing home, or the other hospital he was admitted to shortly before his death. I had never been to this facility before, but in the dream I figured out that it was the behavioral hospital.

I walked through several long hallways, asking for the way to his room, and I was given directions but only grudgingly, it seemed. Several people told me that I really shouldn't be there. "I'm here to see my husband, and I'm going to see him!" I kept saying. Finally I got to his room, and was astounded by what I saw.

I had been expecting Ron to either be in a room by himself, or at least a room with one other male roommate. But this was a big room with a bunch of beds. It wasn't like a regular hospital ward, with the beds arranged neatly in rows; rather, they were scattered willy-nilly around the room. Most of the beds were occupied, and people were milling about the room.

Even more weird, the room was co-ed. I passed one bed where a woman, who was obviously one of the patients, was sitting and having a session with what seemed to be a psychiatrist or therapist, right out there in the open where anyone could listen in. That was a little disturbing. Did confidentiality mean nothing there?

But I still couldn't find Ron. I asked a couple more people who seemed to be staff members where he was. Again I met resistance. One person who was apparently a nurse glared at me and told me firmly, "You don't need to be here!"

"Oh, but I do," I said. "I have to see my husband!"

Finally I spotted Ron, sprawled out across his bed, his legs hanging over the sides. He was naked. I rushed to him and found a sheet to cover him up, then began talking to him while the nurse person glared at me for a while longer before she wandered off and found someone else to glare at. Ron was mostly out of it; he barely opened his eyes, and didn't seem to recognize me.

I kept talking to him, but he only responded with whispers or mumbles that I couldn't quite understand. I leaned closer to him so I could hear him better, but I still couldn't understand a word he was saying. But I still kept talking to him, and finally some words came out that I did understand.

He said, "Find out... please find out."

I responded, "Find out what?"

"Find out... what happened to me here. Please!"

And then the dream faded, like they always do. But it didn't fade from my memory.

What does it mean?
The Occam's razor explanation, preferred by skeptical purists and other practical sorts, would be that my very vivid dream simply reflected deep concerns I already had. But I'm not quite the skeptical purist that I once was, and while I'm certainly willing to accept the Occam's razor version, I'm equally willing to consider that maybe Ron was really sending me a message. What I do know is that I want answers to this medical mystery. And I do intend to pursue those answers.

Before I got Ron's death certificate, I was expecting that the cause of death would be listed as acute respiratory failure, or something related to his heart (he started having heart problems after he got back from the behavioral hospital). To my consternation, the cause of death was listed as "senile degeneration of brain." Which sounds totally bogus to me, and in fact a long-time client, turned friend, who is a retired physician, agreed that it sounded like bullshit. People almost never die of dementia; they die with it. Dementia might be a factor in events leading to their deaths, but it's almost never a primary cause.

There hadn't been an autopsy, and now the physical Ron has been reduced to a box of ashes that is sitting on his desk in our office, guarded over by a wooden Buddha figure. But I still have questions.

For now, though, I'm having to deal with so many other things, and there's so much to do, and so much to face, and so much that I just cannot face yet. I will face it all in time; these things take time, or so I'm told. As it is now, I still sometimes want to put my hands over my eyes and pretend that the nightmare of the past few years never happened.

But in the words most often credited to the (rightfully) much-criticized actor Johnny Depp, though they've also been credited to Anonymous: "You can close your eyes to the things you don't want to see, but you can't close your heart to the things you don't want to feel."

I'm certainly not trying to close my heart. But sometimes, sometimes... it gets a little overwhelmed, and I feel that I need to shield it from itself.

Related on this Whirled:

Before you leave...
While money cannot make some personal nightmares go away, it can make them far easier to bear. With Ron's passing, I have experienced significant income loss and am scrambling to find more work, but in an industry increasingly being taken over by AI, it has been a challenge. Now more than ever, donations are urgently needed and profoundly appreciated. Here are some ways to do it:

  • New: Venmo -- username @Connie-Schmidt-42. Here is a direct link to the Venmo page.
  • New: PayPal -- Here is a direct link to my PayPal page.
  • Old but still good: You can click on the "Donate" icon that currently appears on the right-hand side of every page of this blog on the Web version. There's also a donation link at the end of many of my older blog posts. In the case of both the icon and the links on the older posts, as well as the link in this sentence, this is also a PayPal link, but it references the email account RevRon -- which is cool, because it all ultimately goes to the same place.

NOTE: If you are donating by PayPal, please specify that your contribution is for "friends and family," which will waive PayPal's substantial transaction fee.

Whether you can donate or not, thank you for visiting this Whirled.

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