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Re: [OM] The end of a journey

Subject: Re: [OM] The end of a journey
From: Chuck Norcutt <chucknorcutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 03 Feb 2014 11:00:23 -0500
My condolences to you and Sheri and I trust that you'll soon be able to 
resume a more normal life.  Good luck with the VA.

Chuck Norcutt


On 2/2/2014 4:50 PM, Paul Braun wrote:
> I meant to post this earlier, but this past week has been simply insane.
>
> My wife's mother, who was 95, had been in the hospital for about a
> week-and-a-half due to a severe systemic infection.  She had been on
> some antibiotics, but what we didn't realize is that it was slowly
> getting worse and that, at 95, your body really just isn't equipped to
> fight back that much.  And the hospital stay really wasn't doing much.
> A week ago Monday, we made the decision to have her transferred to the
> hospice center here in town to allow her to rest comfortably without all
> of the confusion of being in a hospital. She finally passed away this
> past Thursday.
>
> The end wasn't very pleasant, even with the medications that the hospice
> angels were giving her.
>
> Adrienne was fiercely loyal to her family.  But to others, she was a
> lifelong non-social person.  We tried to get her to take a roommate at
> the assisted-living facility, but she was having none of that. Guess it
> was too much to hope that she'd change after 90-some years....
>
> We just finished emptying out her apartment.  The thing that my wife and
> I find both hilarious and bewildering is that every time we'd go see her
> or talk to her on the phone, she'd complain about the conditions and
> that she needed to get out of there ASAP. (I know that some
> assisted-living places are, in fact, bad news.  But this place was
> brand-new, clean, comfortable, and all of the help were extremely
> nice).  But as we were carrying her stuff out, everyone we met told us
> how much they loved Adrienne and how she always asked how they were
> doing or how their family was...  It's like there was "Mom while we're
> here" and "Mom when we're not".
>
> We were very concerned even at the end - at the hospital, the evaluated
> her and said that yes, she definitely qualified for hospice care and
> they didn't think she'd last more than three or four days.  But she kept
> hanging in there.  Even this past Monday, while they were installing our
> furnace, the VNA called and told my wife if she wanted to say goodbye,
> that now was the time.  Yet, she hung in there.  The way Medicare works,
> when you go into hospice, they will pay 100% up to 10 days, after that,
> you have the choice to bring her home and get home hospice care, or pay
> on your own at $550 a day.  Thursday was the 10th day.  It's almost like
> she was just hanging in to maximize her Medicare benefits....
>
> This photo, which some of you may remember, was taken last year when we
> took her out for Mothers' Day dinner.  At this point, she was 94.
>
> She was pretty lucid and feisty almost up to the end (we took her back
> to the seafood place for her birthday in December), but she had declined
> pretty rapidly in the past year.  She'd been through several major
> losses in her life, including her parents (her mom died was living with
> them when the house burned and her mother died in the fire), her brother
> sometime after Sheri and I were married, her husband back in 1981 or 82,
> and my brother-in-law, her baby boy, two years ago.  I think Terry's
> death really took a lot of the wind out of her sails.
>
> So now, we sort the estate out ( there wasn't much left at the end) and
> continue to fight the VA for the housing benefits she qualified for but
> they have been denying us for the past two years.  For crying out loud,
> she was mid-90's, not well, and the widow of a WWII veteran.  She
> qualified for the money.
>
> And then we move on with life.  Both Sheri and I are completely out of
> parents at this point.  Quite frankly, I've had enough death in my life
> in the past year.  I really need a break.
>
> http://zone-10.com/tope2/main.php?g2_itemId=5293
>
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