Three days later, Mom was informed by the social worker that she couldn’t talk to Dad at all because he had COVID-19 and the tech girl wasn’t allowed in his room. This was devastating news! The once-a-day phone calls were the only connection Mom had to Dad and now those were gone, too! Also, just as in the hospital, Dad's room was located on an upper floor so Mom couldn't even sit outside his window and see him.
This felt like another spiritual battle with the enemy trying once again to isolate Dad and take away our voices so that he would feel alone and give up. I wrote to some trusted prayer partners and asked them to pray for Dad and Mom. So we prayed for God to send His angels to surround Dad at the rehab hospital just as we’d prayed for it at the hospital.
By now, Dad hadn’t heard from us in three days. There was no phone in his rooms so my brother asked a nurse to find the tablet in Dad's bag of possession sent with him from the hospital. The tablet was equipped with Skype and we were able to get into Dad's Skype account so that calls could be made from the tablet directly to Mom’s home phone. Now we just needed them to find Dad’s tablet, charge it, and follow the directions we sent to be able to use it.
On Tuesday, day 5 of Dad’s stay, he seemed to be doing better and was at a lower setting on the ventilator again. The social worker said she would get the tablet set up in Dad’s room so it could be used. I called the nurses’ desk and was able to get an update from the nurse who had taken care of Dad that day. She sounded exhausted and my heart went out to her. She also seemed concerned about Dad’s condition—they had put restraints on him because he was trying to get out of bed and pull out his tube. Now he was kicking like crazy and had actually gotten a blister on his foot because of the kicking, so she’d put a bandage on to keep it protected. All of my frustration about the phone calls disappeared when I was actually able to talk to someone and hear that she did care and that she was trying her best in a horrible situation. “I’m supposed to go into the COVID rooms as little as possible, but I’ve been going in there all day!” she told me. She was trying to set up a call on another device for Dad’s roommate, who was also sedated. And she didn’t have the right password to get into it, so she had to take off all the PPE and call the family from the nurses’ station, then get into new PPE and try to call again from the room!
When she mentioned Dad’s attempts to get out of bed, I told her that I thought Dad was probably trying to look for Mom. “The last he heard from her, he was being put into an ambulance and he hasn’t heard her voice since,” I said. “I bet he’s trying to get out of bed to find her. They have this beautiful love story, the kind you see in the movies. In fact, if you’ve seen the movie UP, where they have their chairs next to each other, well Mom and Dad have that, too. And Mom sits in Dad’s chair every day and just waits for the phone to ring.” Then I told the nurse, “We aren’t mad at you. We know you nurses are working so hard in a bad situation, but we’re frustrated that management hasn’t done something to make it possible for us to contact our loved ones without it all falling on you.” On the other end, it sounded like she might be crying.
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