I feel badly: I can't remember his face. It has been a couple of months since I went to see him. And I only saw him once.
I do remember where he lived. I got lost trying to find him. Actually, the directions to his home were clear, and I had no problem finding the RV park. After driving up and down the rows of RV's, I had to call him and get more definitive directions.
Thirty or forty years ago, the RV park was probably quite pretty. Nestled among eucalyptus trees, west of the state highway, I can see that it used to be quite well maintained. Winding dirt roads, between rows of mobile metal homes long past their prime, led to the edge of a cow pasture.
If the park was prettier in its heyday, it certainly was never more crowded. Even on a busy summer holiday weekend, in the seventies, it couldn't have been more populated. Every RV had at least one vehicle in front. Most had children's toys gathered in the dirt that served as the front “yard” for each.
Dogs, on chains, languished in the yards, watching the occasional stranger wander through the park. As I pulled up to his RV, the patient was waving to me from the door. His RV stood out to me: there were pansies planted in circular plots, around each pole on the property. The phone pole, the address sign, the propane tank....all were decorated with sweet, blue pansies.
Stepping carefully inside the fifth wheel, I was amazed at the fact that he was living there, not traveling in it. My nursing bag and I barely fit through the door. He motioned to me to sit on the couch with him. Sitting there, talking to me, he could reach his “kitchen”, his “dining table” and his bed.
It's good that he could reach things without having to move because his breathing was severely compromised and he became short of breath with only minimal exertion. We had to talk loud over the noise of the oxygen concentrator.
He was a Vietnam veteran, injured many times during his tour of duty there. He says that smoking is what did him in, and he only quit because the doctor told him it was going to kill him. Besides, he can't get outside to smoke, and he can't smoke around the oxygen. He knew he had to stop, and he apologized for being so crabby: he was only in his second week of not smoking.
In the course of our visit, he had opened up to me and been quite talkative. He was truly looking forward to his new chance in life. In telling me his story, he was very matter-of-fact. Even though some difficult things had happened to him, he was not feeling sorry for himself. It's just the way things were in his life.
The nurse who usually visited him was on vacation and had asked me to see him and, if there were no new issues, to go ahead and discharge him from nursing services. The physical therapist was still working with him, trying to help him increase his energy levels.
And the social worker had been to see him, too. It seems that the patient was trying to find a place to live, in a real apartment. The social worker had helped him find an apartment in senior housing, and helped with the paperwork for him to get in.
I remember asking him how he was going to move his things, since he couldn't drive. He had already found a young man to help him move, in exchange for his fifth wheel. So, things were in place for him to move on and have a better life.
Things have been really busy at work recently, and I hadn't thought about him in quite a while. Today, I got an email from the social worker: it seems that the same week that he was supposed to move into his apartment, he fell ill again and was hospitalized.
I would like to tell you that he is all settled in his new apartment and enjoying his new life, but I can't. He never made it out of the hospital. Once again, in his attempts to better his life, someone or something snuck in and took it from him. I don't pretend to understand why such things happen.
Or why his last chance had to be stolen from him...
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