Hello OD!

It has been quite a crazy time. It’s been tough to come on here and write because I’ve been dealing with so much emotionally.

My grandfather recently passed. He was a strong, independent man, who had so much more life to live. He was in the beginning stages of dementia. But he fell and broke his hip. One fall. And he couldn’t recover.

To be fair, he fell and had surgery and was recovering fine and quickly, but then he fell again at the rehab and hit his head. And then he dislocated his hip. Moving from place to place was not good for his dementia. Soon after, he caught COVID. He was fully vaccinated and no one really knew how severe of a case he got because of everything else going.

Since his fall we were looking for caregivers and nurses; nursing homes and  memory care facilities and everything in between. He needed extra care at the rehab centers because they were short staffed. He needed overnight care at the hospital because he would get confused. He needed a care plan for after he left because he could no longer live alone.

But he didn’t make it. His kidneys began to fail. He dislocated his hip again. He got pneumonia and his lungs were filling up with fluid. We hit the point of no return and he begged for it all to stop. So he ended up in comfort care where he lasted almost a week.

The hard part for me is not getting to see him. Everyone got to see him but me. Omicron was rampant and I was in my first trimester. My doctor warned that testing positive for covid would increase my risk of miscarrying. And he was healing, getting better every step of the way at the beginning. And i was waiting until he could be somewhere safer for me to visit him. Then he tested positive for covid and I knew it was too risky for me to try to visit him and then he never recovered.

I don’t think I’ve processed it yet. I still don’t feel like he’s gone.

Funeral’s tomorrow. I’ll be saying the eulogy. And reminding everyone what a wonderful life this man had.