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By Dan Barry
His daughters were not at his bedside, holding his hand. His sons were not making him smile with wisecracks about the institutional setting. His grandchildren were not cheering him up with reports from the distant world of youth.
Joseph Trinity’s
family members were there one day, and then they were not, for the same
reason much of the world is trying to suppress the human desire to be
with one another: the coronavirus.
Mr.
Trinity had found himself in a New Jersey rehabilitation facility that,
like most health care institutions across the country, had declared a
no-visitor policy to stem contagion. But he is 92, and in fragile
health; family sustains him.
Several times a day, he would call his
daughter, Mary Trinity, to ask in a faint, slightly garbled voice where
everyone was — and to beg her to please, please, get him out of there.
Mr. Trinity was caught in a moment. And he wasn’t alone.
The
federal government and various health care associations have issued
strongly restrictive guidelines to prohibit family members and other
nonessential personnel from visiting nursing homes, rehab centers and
other facilities with older, vulnerable residents.
“We know there have been challenging
episodes with family members, vendors, state survey teams and even a few
ombudsmen or postal carriers, not wanting to comply,” Mark Parkinson,
the president of the American Health Care Association and the National
Center for Assisted Living, wrote last week. As awareness of the
coronavirus grows, he added, “hopefully those challenges will diminish.”
But
Richard J. Mollot, the director of the Long Term Care Community
Coalition, an advocacy group for people in institutional residential
settings, said in an email that he was “deeply concerned about residents
being cut off from their loved ones.”
While
emphasizing the need for extensive precautions, Mr. Mollot said that
banning family members, but not employees who come and go — some to
second jobs as home-care aides — makes no sense. He also noted that
families are more than friendly faces; they help with eating and
drinking and with monitoring medications and treatment.
“What are residents going to do without them?” he asked.
Mr.
Trinity’s own odyssey began at his home late last month, as he pushed
his walker to the bathroom to brush his teeth before calling it a night.
He fell beside the sink, fractured his hip and could not get up. His
live-in caretaker alerted his family.
Soon an ambulance was taking him away from his home in Maplewood, N.J., in a blur of flashing red lights.
This
was the house that Mr. Trinity and his wife, Mary, bought in 1959, the
same year the couple, both public schoolteachers, married. This was the
house where they raised five children on not a lot of money; brief
summer vacations meant a motel pool and pizza as a special treat.
He
taught drama and speech at Jonathan Dayton High School in nearby
Springfield for 30 years. The photos of him in yearbooks stored in the
basement mark time’s passage, progressing from military-style buzz cuts
to blondish-gray hair touching the ears.
Mr.
Trinity retired but sold real estate part-time. Children married. His
Mary died at 62: irreplaceable. Grandchildren crawled, then walked, then
invited him to high school and college and law school graduations.
Mobility
declined, and some independence was forfeited, reluctantly. But there
was a cocktail before dinner, and “Jeopardy” at 7, and family gatherings
on Sundays and holidays — until it was all interrupted by a fall.
Mr.
Trinity waited until five the next morning before receiving a bed at a
hospital in Summit, six miles away. Two of his children stayed with him
through the night and into the next day, when he underwent surgery. The
three other children soon arrived, from western New Jersey and Boston
and Washington, D.C., to hold hands, crack wise and just be there, as
February gave way to March.
They took note of the bathroom signs recommending that they sing the
ABCs while washing hands to scrub out the H.A.I.s, or hospital acquired
infections. They made liberal use of the hand sanitizer dispensers at
every entrance and exit.
Mr. Trinity
barely caught his breath before being taken, again by ambulance, to a
rehabilitation center, where he was to engage in physical and
occupational therapies. But this was a 92-year-old man who had had
trouble walking even before his hip fracture, and who was also
navigating the disorienting sea of pain, medication and an institution
that was not his home.
Then, at noon
on March 13 — only a week ago — the facility barred visitors. No
familiar faces. No jokes. No reassuring squeezes of his hand.
Mr.
Trinity begged by telephone to be rescued, his words weak, anxious,
sometimes disconnected. His children faced a heartbreaking dilemma.
Should
their father remain in the care of professionals who were much better
equipped to handle his myriad needs? Or was he at greater risk of
contracting the virus by remaining in an institution?
And given the prevailing threat and the open-endedness of restrictions, was it possible they would never see him again?
On Saturday
night, the five Trinity children talked it through by conference call.
But they already knew there was really only one answer.
On
Sunday, they divided assignments: calling the doctors and hospice
services and the home health care agency; preparing the family home by
moving the table out of the dining room and clearing clutter; ordering a
bed; reassuring him when he called again.
And
they arranged for an ambulance, which pulled up to the facility early
Monday afternoon. Soon a wheeled-out Mr. Trinity was squinting in the
daylight.
“I’m so happy,” he said from the gurney. “This is the second-happiest day of my life.”
Two
emergency medical technicians locked him in place, closed the back
doors and headed off for Maplewood. The ambulance wended its way through
a landscape thoroughly altered from the one Mr. Trinity had left behind
less than three weeks earlier.
Past
the West Essex Y.M.C.A., closed, and the Livingston Public Library,
closed. Past an electronic sign reminding people to wash hands, and a
ShopRite so packed that the presence of a police car with blinking
lights was required.
The ambulance
passed through a suburban landscape that looked the same, yet was
transformed somehow, as if existing in a state of suspension. Then it
drove into his hometown, where the schools are closed and the
playgrounds padlocked.
The ambulance
turned right onto his street and passed the century-old houses he still
identifies by the surnames of the families who lived there 30, 40, 50
years ago. Finally, it pulled up to his own home, where six family
members were waiting.
“Welcome home!” someone called out.
“Thank you, thank you,” he said, failing not to cry.
The
two E.M.T.s, wearing blue latex gloves, wheeled him up a ramp and
gently placed him in the bed that now centered the dining room. Family
photographs were displayed on a cabinet, along with a fresh bouquet of
yellow roses.
Full Article & Source:
92 Years Old, Scared and Pleading to Come Home
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