Alone -- And Scared

I met Beth when I started at USF in the fall of 1965.  We were part of a close-knit college crowd that stayed together loosely over the years.  In or around 2010, I was living in Texas and got a Facebook pop-up from a "Beth Walker."  I didn't recognize her married name, but we soon realized we had been friends way back when.

 

I was traveling between Texas and Florida, trying to see the last manned space launch.  While visiting with friends in Stuart, Beth reached out to me via computer and I suggested she come down and "hang out" with us.  She did, and the rest is history.

 

You see, after traveling back and forth for a number of years, Beth and I decided to be together for the rest of our lives.  And to take care of one another forever.  I moved back here to her beautiful property here in Odessa, although I've always thought of myself as a South Tampa boy (Hyde Park and Gray Gables, and the bay side of Westshore just south of Euclid).

 

I sold my house and most of my belongings and came to live with Beth July 3, 2016.  We were our own best friends, mainly because most of my Tampa friends either still lived south of Kennedy or how moved elsewhere.  In a way, we started out isolated because this is four acres of country, fronting on Lake Hiawatha.  There are nearby neighbors, but no one I could really call a "friend."

 

Beth had been a lifelong smoker but had stopped cold turkey about 3 years ago.  Still, they had to arthroscopically remove a wedge section of the lower lobe of her right lung in December 2018.  When January rolled around this year, I beseeched Beth to schedule her annual follow-up tests.  But she procrastinated -- and then the virus hit in March.  She finally pushed on and got the tests.

 

It was about three weeks before the 4th of July weekend, on a Sunday night when she received her test results online.  They were not good.  There was something growing again in the lower right lobe -- and it hadn't been there a year ago.  That meant it was growing fairly quickly.  

 

The very next day we went to the scheduled appointment with her lung surgeon.  Getting right to the point, he said he wanted to go in and arthroscopically remove (as in the past) the entire lower lobe.  The recovery, he said, would be fairly quick since the procedure was not too invasive.  He wanted whatever was in there OUT.  And so surgery was scheduled July 6, just after the holiday.  But what had changed was hospital visitation: it was now prohibited.  We went to get her COVID-19 test the week before and then showed up at 6 a.m. on Monday.  I pulled down Beth's mask, kissed her warmly on the lips, told her I loved her and whispered encouraging words.

 

It would be the last time I saw her alive.

 

She went under the knife around noon, but things went awry quickly.  The surgeon encountered so much scar tissue stuck to the lung that he had to open her up with a foot-long incision, remove a large rib just below her breast, and start cutting away the lobe from everything that had somehow grown attached to it.

 

Unbelievably, she called me that night, exhausted.  "I'm tired," she said.  "And I'm having trouble breathing."  My reply was to say something encouraging, like "Of course, look what you've just been through."  I told her to try to get some rest and I would call the hospital early the next morning to see how she had made it through the night.

 

The next day, I called bright and early but couldn't get anyone to answer until around mid-morning.  I got ICU nursing first, I think, and they said that they would be getting her up in the recliner and having her breathe into the spirometer to improve her lung capacity.  And then I talked to Beth once more.  She said, "I'm tired and I'm scared."  It was heart-breaking that I could not be with her. Again, I pleaded with her to get some rest.

 

The nurses said I would be contacted by a nurse and a physician late that afternoon.  But as the day wore on, there was no phone call.  Living out here in the country, I decided to take the car up the long driveway to get the mail and to stop by the old, broken-down barn where we feed a small colony of feral cats.

 

As I stopped the car to feed her little family -- she did love them so -- the phone rang.  It was the surgeon.  "Beth as taken a turn for the worse," he said.  She was unconscious, they had had to intubate her and put her on the ventilator.  "Her lungs filled up with fluid," the surgeon told me.  "We could hear her gurgling from across the ICU, struggling for breath."  He went on to describe some medical conditions, but when he used the term "ARDS," my ears perked up.  I had been reading about ARDS in conjunction with COVID-19, and I knew it was not a good sign.  I stopped the surgeon and said, "If this is possibly end-of-life, I need to be there."  He was silent for a moment, thinking.  "Yes.  We can make that happen now."  He said to head for the hospital.  Before I got to the house, just a few hundred yards down the drive, the phone rang again and it was the nurse.  "Just come to the emergency room entrance and we'll bring you right up, " she said.

 

How scared Beth must have been.  So all alone.

 

I went into the house.  I had been using a couple group text messages to update Beth's closest friends on her condition, and I sent out a message that alerted them to the fact that Beth was in trouble and I was heading for the hospital.

 

I got in the car and headed straight for AdventHealth North Pinellas.  I was in downtown Tarpon Springs when my cell phone rang.  "Where are you?" said the nurse.  "I'm just five minutes away," I replied.  "Oh, OK.  Just call us from the parking lot when you get here and we'll get you right up."

 

At the hospital, a nurse just going on shift -- who wasn't aware of Beth's situation -- took me up to ICU.  She started to bring me into ICU but we were stopped.  "You can't bring him in here.  He has to talk to the surgeon first," they told us.  I was taken around to the waiting room where the surgeon arrived within a couple of minutes.  The first thing he said was, "You need to sit down."  Just like any nightmarish movie ... only it was real.

 

"Beth has expired," he said.  He went on to say they had been trying to revive her for the past two hours.  Her heart and stopped and they could not restart it.

 

I was taken in to her, they closed the curtains around us, and I took her cold hand and held it.  I talked to her and cried softly.  I stood up to kiss her on the forehead and -- she was still warm.  I touched the side of her neck and it, too, was warm. I knew at that moment, that when they called me in the car, that they were trying to notify me she had passed away.

 

I sat with her for about 20 minutes, gathered up her belongings, and headed how via the back roads of Keystone.  I don't know how I made it home.

 

And so, here I am today, totally alone.  Out in the country with just a few neighbors.  Unable to go anywhere because of the coronavirus.  And dealing with the death of the woman I vowed to care for for the rest of her life.

 

My heart is broken and I move like a zombie through the hours of each day, stuck in the house that was for a few months our coronavirus prison.  I keep thinking I'll hear her voice or see her coming through the door.  But isolation is my sentence.  How long must we suffer?

 

 

Written with care and emotion,

I am ...

(Email written Aug. 19, 2020, to a local newspaper reporter wanting stories about COVID-19 isolation.)

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The Brutal End

I was moved to tears.

I had been driving the sidestreets somewhat off the highway, trying to get a decent photograph of a tattered and torn American flag, flying ever so proudly in the wind -- despite its deplorable condition. 

My search led me to a feeling much deeper than the anger I felt upon seeing the stately symbol.  I felt the deepest sorrow.  And I felt helpless ...

What I saw was something I never expected to see, and I only glanced it for a second.  The flock of vultures had surrounded what I believed to be the carcass of an animal that hadn't made it across the street.  It's an area of development -- tens of thousands of new houses and commercial development along the fringes.

The poor animals who had formerly called the placid pastures and cypress swamps their homes were being displaced at a furious pace.

I was struck by the thought that it was the inevitable final chapter -- where one animal must be sacrificed so that others will continue to thrive.  But I cried out loud when I came abreast of the dark feast.  The vultures were greedily picking apart the body.

But for a brief second -- my heart stopped -- when I saw the raccoon raise its head, to itself witness its own end.  How terrific, horrible.  I could feel their beaks slicing through my heart.

I wanted to stop the car.  Get out.  Put it out of its misery.

But I did not.

Stunned, I drove ahead, turned the corner and drew a deep breath.

I'm so sorry, my friend.  May you find peace tonight.  I cannot unsee his brutal end, and what it may portend.

The Light At The End Of The Tunnel

As I approach my 70th birthday, I am aware that I am aware.

I am aware that I am -- old.  Worse yet, I am aware that my time on this earth is limited.  For me, the light at the end of the tunnel is red.  It's a stop light.  And I am in no hurry to, as they say, "go toward the light."

It distresses me to be thinking this way, to have these thoughts.  Although it's been coming on slowly, the awareness that there is so little time left has been nagging at me for the the last year.

There are several things that are bringing my mortality into sharp focus.

First, there are the funerals.  I retired in 2008 after seeing co-workers, some years younger than me, die of horrible diseases.  I wanted to live life -- what was left of it -- and not regret having worked right up to the day I experience a debilitating heart attack or stroke.  Recently I attended back-to-back funerals.  The first day, the funeral was for a man just a few months older than me.  Believe me, that got me thinking.  The next day I attended the funeral for the father of one of my oldest friends, a friend who is just about my age.  His father had lived to be 95 years old.  Although he was physically frail, his mind was wonderfully sharp.  I was actually jealous because -- given my frame of mind -- I couldn't see me living that long.  And I wanted to.  I still want to.

But recent medical events in my life have me question my own viability.  I won't go into all the details.  Oh, sure, I have the normal aches and pains that I imagine someone my age has.  I ruined both knees long ago playing tennis.  I tore one shoulder decades ago, falling backward in a slimy parking lot.  I tore the other shoulder -- my right shoulder -- playing ping pong.  That's right.  You read that correctly.  I literally threw my arm out of its socket.  The worst part of all this is that I am a shoulder sleeper and go back and forth, from one shoulder to the other, all night long -- waking each time I turn.

The fact that I continuously test anemic is more than worrisome.  The doctors at the VA have all but given up trying to find out why.  My primary physician back in Texas duly noted it, would mention it each time I had blood tests, and then we would not talk about it anymore.  And the fact that my father died of a blood disorder -- the swift onset of chronic leukemia -- does not give me confidence.

For most of my life I've been deadline oriented.  As a newspaper writer/editor, I tackled three deadlines daily for more than a decade.  When I set goals, I usually meet them.  But it may have been a mistake a number of years ago to set one deadline in particular.  That deadline was my death date.  I was meeting with my financial adviser and, as with any good financial plan, we needed to estimate how long I intended to live in order for my savings to be meted out without running out.

"Eighty-five," I said.  "That sounds like a ripe, old age."

Maybe 85 seemed far away when I was in my early 60s.  But it doesn't anymore.  In fact, 80 seems real close -- like that stop light at the end of the tunnel.  I get the feeling I'm managing my life to meet this final deadline.

I hate this futile way of thinking.  I feel disgusted when I wake up in the morning and realize I did nothing the day before that was remarkable.  I took up motorcycle touring in 2005 because I wanted to put something in my life that made my heart beat faster.

I am going to try harder to live my life to the fullest.  I am going to set some more goals, plan more trips, get more involved.  I no longer want life to just seep into me; I want to go out and embrace it.

Maybe, just maybe, I can change that light at the end of the tunnel from red to green.  And if not, at least I raced to the end instead of simply coasting.