Part 5: Major Changes
Apart from the changes in our lives that I mentioned in my previous post, there have been two other changes that have had a greater impact on us. They both involved COVID. Before it came onto the scene around March 2020, our lives were already shrinking, but we had no idea how the Pandemic would affect our lives.
Prior to Pandemic, we spent an hour or hour and a half every morning at Panera and about the same amount of time at the café at Barnes and Noble every afternoon. Coupled with eating out for lunch and dinner, we were away from home a large part of every day.
COVID brought that to a halt. Suddenly, we were trapped in our home without the social contact we had enjoyed for so long, but that wasn’t all the damage COVID left for us. The biggest hit occurred when Kate and I had COVID almost eight months later when it seemed safer to get out. My case was mild and ended quickly, but she was hospitalized for eight days. That changed her life forever. It wasn’t COVID alone that hurt us. The whole experience was traumatizing for her.
She was frightened by the ambulance attendants who were naturally strangers to her. As they took her out the front door to the ambulance, she was screaming, “Help me! Help me! Somebody help me!. To her, it must have seemed as though she were being kidnapped. I was the only one she knew, but the hospital did not allow visitors at the time.
She was without me for eight days. She didn’t know anything about COVID or that she was sick. All she knew was that strangers had taken her out of comfort zone, and in the hospital they were doing things she didn’t understand and didn’t like. The impact on her was so great that she didn’t want to be touched when she got home, and we had to do the same kind of things they had done in the hospital to take care of her daily needs.
Before COVID and her hospitalization, Kate was beginning to lose her mobility and was in the early stage of aphasia. COVID made them a permanent part of her life. For five months, we began to adapt to a new world in our home. Then we moved to Still Hopes Episcopal Retirement Community where we live today. We have established a new routine that is significantly more restricted than before, but we are living joyfully despite the combination of Alzheimer’s, COVID, and a stroke Kate experienced a year after our move.
