‘I never had a chance to say goodbye’

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This article was published 06/05/2020 (2119 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The son who didn’t get another chance to see his dying father. A husband and daughter who aren’t able to see his wife and her mother while she fights terminal cancer.

These are just two Winnipeg families who were already going through a terrible time, but whose grief and pain have been exacerbated because of the restrictions put on visitors to hospitals and long-term care facilities — including the Riverview Health Centre — during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Six months from now, or a year, people will look back and think that was a terrible thing we did,” said Jamie Brown, whose dad Robert, 72, died early Sunday at Riverview.

“This is people dying. This is family. I never had a chance to say goodbye. When the ambulance took him away that was the last I ever saw him.

“Maybe someone needs to recalibrate this so another family doesn’t have to deal with this.”

It’s similar to the situation facing Greg Krall, whose wife of 47 years, Cora, is battling terminal cancer in St. Boniface Hospital.

“She’s terribly ill, but not at the stage where she will die yet,” Krall said on Tuesday.

“I haven’t seen her in two weeks. I begged them. She is terribly ill, but they wouldn’t budge. I guess she doesn’t meet their criteria.

“This has been a long hard ride.”

Krall finally saw his wife for the first time on Wednesday, but it was at an hour-long meeting dealing with future plans for palliative care and afterwards he had to leave.

In a memo first sent in March to acute care facilities, and updated last month, Dr. Brent Roussin, the province’s chief public health officer, and Lanette Siragusa, Shared Health’s chief nursing officer, said in order to protect patients from contracting COVID-19 they were implementing “strict precautions to protect our patients” and would immediately suspend visitor access on March 19. They said the only exceptions would be for compassionate reasons or end-of-life “on a case-by-case basis.”

Similarly, the pair sent a memo, which was updated March 27, “strongly recommending” visitors be restricted from going inside long-term care facilities, while saying it would be up to individual facility managers to make exceptions for compassionate reasons or end-of-life on individual situations.

But Brown said for him that meant for the two days his dad was in Riverview he wasn’t allowed to see him, because he wasn’t diagnosed as being close to dying.

He said that changed on Sunday at about 1 a.m., when his dad took a sudden turn for the worse. The facility phoned his residence — he missed the call — and then called his sister, who was then allowed to go to Riverview with her stepmother. His father died four hours later.

“My wish would be that someone in Dr. Roussin’s office, or Dr. Roussin himself, would say we did this a month ago, let’s look at it again,” Brown said.

“All these people have been alone. When you know people have very short time, at the end of their lives to not allow family to visit, that’s wrong.

“So other families don’t have to go through this, surely this deserves a second look.”

During Wednesday’s provincial update on Manitoba’s response to coronavirus, Siragusa said health officials are looking at whether to ease current restrictions on visitors and “will continue to re-evaluate that.”

Siragusa said since the restrictions were put in place workers at long-term care facilities are now restricted from working at more than one care home.

“The team is working on what that would look like,” she said. “So it won’t be in the next week I don’t think.

“We want to just watch and make sure with the staffing changes that just happened recently that everybody is safe and stable, and then we will be looking at when we can open up and loosen those restrictions as soon as possible.”

Krall said the hardest thing for him, besides the separation, has been not being allowed in hospital to see his wife and advocate to help make decisions for her care.

“She fell three times this weekend and they never called us — she told us she fell when we talked to her on the phone,” he said.

Krall said until now he hasn’t been separated from his wife in 47 years — not even for a vacation — and they were together for several years before that.

“We met in Grade 7 and began dating in Grade 8 — we’ve never been apart. Everyone who knows us knows we’ve always been together.”

Their daughter, Carly Lowing, said not being able to visit is hard on her as well, especially with the province beginning to ease restrictions in other areas that were put in place to combat COVID-19.

“You can go have a beer with your buddy on the patio but I can’t go see my dying mom and give her a hug and say I love you?” Lowing said.

“It’s just ridiculous.”

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca