My husband and I have experienced a traumatizing event in the past 24 hours #covid #personalstory #threadstorytime
A few days ago, we made arrangements with my husband’s sister to have their travelling mom live with us for a bit during the quarantine period immediately after her arrival. My mother in law “officially” lived with my sister in law. And the latter has an immunocompromised child.
My MIL left the country to go to France in mid January this year. She usually arranges this type of trip yearly to be with her retired sisters who live there. This year they planned to go to a pacific island with a group in early March.
The #novelcoronavirus just broke out in the news in January. But by early March #covid had started to wreak havoc in other countries outside China.
To prepare for her arrival I had tried to gather some facts about her current situation - i work in healthcare and for weeks all we have been doing at work is planning for pandemic. I needed to know how to protect myself and my husband while also accommodate my MIL’s return.
But because of factors - language barrier, personal reasons, etc - the best info we got was that she was weak. No cough, no fever, but weak “because of all the walking and activities they did while on holidays”.And she apparently expressed some anxiety over the #covid situation.
My husband was to pick her up at the airport with instructions to wash his hands, social distancing by MIL sitting in the back, and to try not to yell at his mom for not cancelling her side trip. We don’t need any kind of stress on top of her feeling weak and anxious.
I stayed back to prepare for their breakfast. They arrived just before 8am. From where i was standing in the kitchen i can hear my MIL struggling to breathe! She wanted to use the bathroom so hubby helped her.
she had to be cleaned up. My poor MIL was too weak to use the washroom in the plane/airports during her long flights/transfers!
Immediately after we had cleaned her we settled her on the couch to determine next steps. I cleared up the basin and soiled towels for a bit and when I came back, she was trying to lie down gasping for breathe and would not respond to her name. called 911 and started compressions
EMS came and tried to revive her for 30minutes. She got intubated and bagged. And defibrillated...
She died in our home. And because the circumstances around her condition was suspect (recent travel, SOB, weakness) we had to wait for the coroner transporters to take her to be tested for #covid and possibly be autopsied.
No one is allowed to come see her for safety reasons! My husband’s siblings and their families had to say goodbye thru facetime/videocalls. It is so heartbreaking, traumatizing.
My husband and I now have to be in self-isolation and monitoring. Between calls from two public health jurisdictions to find out information in behalf of the family on how to best send her off given the situation (we can’t attend 😭), To sanitizing our place...
To praying hard that we don’t get sick (i have asthma :(), to deal with flashback and guilt for not doing enough, to dealing with anger. It’s a very trying time. #covid
On the upside, our family and work friends have been very supportive. Offering comfort, advice thru technology. My bro in law just dropped off some groceries to last us thru this tough time...
Will need time to process all this trauma. Please pray for us and our health if you don’t believe in prayers, send the universe some good vibes for us. #covid #personalstories
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