"No one ever plans on placing a loved one into a skilled nursing facility. But when you made that promise to Jeanne, her situation was very different." So began a conversation with a good friend of mine. Most everyone who knows me knows that over a decade ago I promised Jeanne that she would never have to face a nursing home. It was an important promise -- one that we both took seriously. And yet here I was, wrestling with her doctors' opinions that although she was ready to be discharged from the hospital, she now required a higher level of care than she could get at home.
I realized that my friend was right. Who really decides that it would be great to place someone into a nursing home? And when I made my promise to Jeanne all those years ago, neither of us could have imagined that MS would have taken such a profound toll on her overall health and quality of life. She had spent the past year in bed 24/7, and had still managed to fracture her leg (twice!), develop a serious blood infection and suffer through an overall decline in her well-being.
Knowing that her doctors were right in their assessment of Jeanne's care requirements, I realized that my commitment to provide her with the best quality of care superceded my promise to never transfer her to a skilled nursing facility. And so I was ready to begin researching the best possible facility for Jeanne. But not before I came face-to-face with one more truth. And that was that keeping Jeanne out of a nursing home now had more to do with me than it did with her.
Having made the decision that finding the right skilled nursing facility was the best next step to take, I still felt horrible about it. And at first, I didn't know why. But I came to realize that once Jeanne was no longer at home, I would be forced to acknowledge the terrible toll that MS had taken on our lives. Although her cognitive decline had already taken away much of who Jeanne really was, at least I could always look across the room and she was "there". Now, she would no longer be. Now, the loss of my beloved wife would physically manifest itself in the emptiness of what was once "home." Now, I needed to make the best decision for her, and suffer my own loneliness and grief in spite of it.
My next post will explore how I went about finding the right place for Jeanne to be and how, in just a few weeks, it's proven itself to be exactly that -- the right place for Jeanne to be.
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