Jeanne's care required more than I could provide by myself. By 2005, I had hired a live-in nurse. And our master bedroom, with Jeanne's hospital bed, low air loss mattress, IV stand, feeding pump, treatment table and medications, now more closely resembled a hospital room.
Not only was the progression of Jeanne's MS affecting her in more profound ways, it was also taking its toll on me, as I realized that I was no longer the unflappable optimist I had been for my entire life. My internal mantra shifted from the almost automatic 'We can beat this,' to the same question that Job had pondered, 'What did we do to deserve this?'
Our home seemed to be haunted by
too many ghosts and too many memories
____________________________
Time continued to pass, punctuated by Jeanne's increasingly frequent trips to the hospital. In 2009, after a two-month hospitalization, Jeanne's doctors staged what could only be described as an intervention (although at the time, I would have described it as an ambush), and they convinced me that Jeanne had reached a point where she required a higher level of professional care than she could receive at home – even with all of the accommodations I had made and the extra help that I had hired.
It was explained to me that Jeanne needed to be placed in a skilled nursing facility, not for those occasional days when there was little change in her condition, but because there had been too many days when almost everything associated with Jeanne's health seemed to crash at once. And so I made the heart-wrenching decision to follow the doctors' recommendation and place Jeanne in a skilled nursing facility.
I learned that some of the best skilled nursing facilities were located in Long Beach, and I found a place for Jeanne in one such facility. As I intended to visit Jeanne daily (something I still do today), it seemed foolish to remain in our beachfront home in Playa Del Rey. We had moved into that home thirteen years earlier specifically because Jeanne had loved the beach, yet once she had been re-located to her skilled nursing facility, our home seemed to be haunted by too many ghosts and too many memories. Not to mention that, by now, our finances had taken a brutal pounding, and it was no longer financially feasible for me to continue living in our home. After negotiating a peaceful retreat with our landlord, I also moved to Long Beach.
[ME & THE BOOK OF JOB | Jonathan Strum ]