A daughter’s tale of her mother dying in ICU
In the last hours of her life, as her condition rapidly worsened, a night nurse gently brushed Jean Pollock’s hair, cleaned her teeth, washed her fevered skin.
So “she would be happy that she didn’t look all dishevelled.”
The next morning, when Pollock’s daughter called — as she had every two hours during a race against time, driving from Vancouver to Ontario — a nurse in the ICU unit at Ross Memorial Hospital in Lindsay said to please hold for a bit because the morning nurse was busy.
Minutes ticked by. Again Pam Smith was told the nurse would be with her shortly.
“Then the nurse came on the line and she said, ‘I was with your mother. She was dying and I didn’t want to leave her alone. She just passed. We were holding her hand. There was another nurse there too and we said a prayer for her.’
“That was so beautiful to hear.”
In these days of fear and unimagined horrors, it was an act of deeply appreciated kindness. As so many of us may become beholden for the kindness of strangers.
“I expected when my mother died that I would be able to sit at her bedside and support her, but I just wasn’t able to,” says Smith, who spent decades as a palliative care grief counsellor. “I wasn’t there. But I’m so grateful to the nurses that she didn’t die alone.”
Smith arrived in Bobcaygeon on Monday. Her mother had passed away at 8:05 Saturday morning. The artist and onetime airline attendant — among the first stewardesses for the commercial carrier that later became Air Canada — had days earlier turned 82.
Pollock is one of 15 deaths linked to a coronavirus outbreak at Pinecrest Nursing Home in Bobcaygeon — the only victim who hadn’t been a resident. But a constant presence as she visited her husband, Ted, who turned 91 on Saturday. Their 29th anniversary was last Tuesday. Pollock was sad that, because the health-care residence, what she called “the house,” was on quarantine lockdown, she could only mail her husband a birthday card and an anniversary card.
At least two dozen staff members at Pinecrest have tested positive for COVID-19. On Wednesday, a cavalcade of Lindsay residents drove by the long-term care facility in an organized honking tribute to its employees.
What has befallen Pinecrest is, tragically, being played out at other long-term care residences and health-care facilities for seniors across the province, at least 22 facilities reporting outbreaks. Eight deaths — three of them overnight — confirmed by Toronto Public Health at Seven Oaks in Scarborough.
The virus preys on the old and the fragile, but certainly not exclusively.
Pollock had been well-known in the community for her volunteer work and civic engagement. She’d sat on the board of the Kawartha Art Gallery, which has made a sizable donation in her memory to a local emergency relief fund.
“There’s been such an outpouring of love for my mom from the community,” says Smith. “Everybody’s shocked that it would be my mom of all people because she was such a dynamo. She had this unrelenting level of energy. For 82, she was up around every day and taking care of her husband.”
The nightmare for the family began mid-month, when Pollock told her two daughters that she wasn’t feeling well. Thought at first it was just a bug. Pollock was unusually sleepy and exhausted but not alarmed. By March 17, her birthday, she had a racking cough, sore throat and high temperature.
“She’s kind of a stubborn woman,” says her daughter. “You’ve got to work really hard to force her to do things.”
The following day, Pollock was taken to emergency by ambulance, tested for COVID-19 and sent back home with medication. Within 24 hours, however — her swab had simultaneously returned positive — she was back in the hospital, admitted.
Smith isn’t angry that her mother, who had mild preexisting chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, was sent home the first time. “Angry isn’t the right word. I was … confused. Quite honestly, if they’d kept her, I think the end result would have been the same.”
With her mother in ICU, Smith and her partner set forth on a 4,300-kilometre trek from Vancouver, deciding that to fly would have been risky, possibly exposing them to asymptomatic passengers. And Smith knew she would not be able to see her mother when she arrived.
“Everybody was amazing,” Smith says of hospital staff. “They said, don’t rush, drive carefully, we’ll take really good care of her until you get here.
“I talked to her the day before I left, after she’d been admitted,” continues Smith, who last saw her mom when she visited Bobcaygeon in January. “She said, ‘I’m going downhill fast.’
“It was surreal,” she says of the fraught drive, checking repeatedly for updates on her mother’s condition as the octogenarian steadily declined. She sensed, in her bones, she would not get there in time. “You’re racing across the country, you know you’re never going to see her alive again. But you’re going anyway.
“I felt like I was on a journey home to see her. At the same time, she was journeying to a different home. It was like a parallel.”
Still frustratingly distant, Smith asked nurses to hold the phone to her mother’s ear. “I told her that she was a great mom and that I loved her.”
But Pollock, on oxygen, could scarcely be understood in her mumblings. Crossing into Ontario, Smith called her mother again. “If she knew at least that I was in Ontario, that she would maybe feel more comforted, that I was close by, even though I couldn’t be by her side.”
Because of her COPD, Pollock couldn’t be put on a ventilator. “This particular virus is attacking the lungs, complicating your already existing lung issues,” Smith explains, relaying the information doctors gave her. “Putting a tube down my mother’s throat, I was told, would be the most excruciating pain she’d ever felt. And then once they got the ventilator into her lungs, because they were so deteriorated, they’d probably explode and she would die instantly.”
Pollock had rallied briefly before her condition degenerated steeply. “The most we can do is keep her comfortable,” the doctor had told Smith. Last Wednesday, the message from the doctor was: “Your mom is fighting to live. And I think we should let her do that.”
So they decided against sedation, which would have compromised the functioning of Pollock’s lungs. But by Thursday the rally had subsided. Pollock was also restless with the oxygen mask, constantly pulling it off. “I told them, don’t put it back in, she doesn’t want it. We’re just prolonging the inevitable. Maybe she knows something that we don’t know. Just leave it.”
When Smith pulled into Bobcaygeon, she went directly to her mother’s house, to get clothes and deliver them to the funeral home.
“My sister Tracey and I were able to see our mom, with our husbands, and they did such a beautiful job. She looked just like she was sleeping.”
A celebration of Jean Pollock’s life will be held later, after the communal crisis has passed and people are able to gather again. Ted Pollock is still alive.
For now, Pam Smith and her partner have rented a place on the lake nearby, not yet ready to face the long drive. Time to think, to remember, to allow the grief she’s been holding at bay. She knows it will hit hard now that the urgency of tasks to be done has passed.
She is part of that growing collective of the directly affected, the mourning survivors.
“Everybody is doing their best, but we can’t control COVID like we think we can. If it can happen to me, to my family, it can happen to anybody.”