Again?

On Thursday Jared--a member of another team who volunteers at the shelter--came upstairs to the clinic to let us know that Ronnie was downstairs and wanted to see the nurse. I told him that I figured Ronnie would want to pull himself up the stairs and would only accept help carrying his wheelchair, but Jared told me that it didn’t look like Ronnie would be going upstairs with or without help any time soon.

Phyllis, the nurse on duty at the time, said there wasn’t much we could do for him, but that she’d go down and talk with him. I went with her as well, and we left Ruth (the emotional one) upstairs taking care of someone’s feet.

Phyllis did most of the talking when we got outside and found Ronnie sitting on the sidewalk. He said he needed more bandages, Q-tips (which he uses to clean out the huge wound on his face), socks and perhaps a sandwich. He also told us that he was losing feeling on the left side of his body as well as his vision. (As I leaned down to talk with him at the foot of his wheelchair, he said he couldn’t see my face at all.) Phyllis asked him if NOW he was ready to go into hospice care. He said no.

She left me downstairs with him as she went upstairs to get the supplies he had asked for, and so I talked with him briefly. Jared brought him an application to the drug/alcohol rehabilitation program run by the shelter, but Ronnie said he couldn’t see well enough to fill out the application. (He couldn’t even see the words to read them.) I told him that I could help him with it after Phyllis got him the things he needed. I could tell that he was quickly deteriorating; he was so much worse than when we had first seen him two days ago, so I decided to ask him about hospice and hoped I’d bet a better answer. He told me that no, he was not ready to go to the hospice hospital, because if he went there he’d DIE.

That was it. I was frustrated. Couldn’t he tell that he was DYING RIGHT THEN AS I LOOKED AT HIM? I mean, he was literally falling apart. Why didn’t he take the one good option available to him?

At this point I said, “Ronnie! We’re ALL going to die.”

Perhaps it wasn’t the most compassionate thing I could’ve mentioned or even the right thing to say, but my frustration had gotten the best of me. Luckily, at this point, Phyllis came downstairs and ended our conversation by handing him the things he had asked for.

We then decided that Ronnie and I would go into a room of the shelter on the ground floor so that I could help him fill out his application for the rehab program there.

I got to know a lot of things about Ronnie while I helped him fill out a ten-page application. I couldn’t really tell how much of it was true, but he said he had two doctorate degrees and had even headed the electrical and automotive department at a community college in my hometown.

He also said he was addicted to crack cocaine, and wanted to get off it before he started collecting his social security check, because he knew that if he didn’t do something, he was going to spend his money on crack even though he really wanted to spend it on food and housing.

However, the rehab program run by the shelter lasts about two years, and Ronnie only has a few more months to live. Pretty soon he will lose the ability of cognitive thought, and someone else will be making his decisions for him.

I don’t think he can accept that he is dying, which is why he must not be ready to go into hospice yet. Even as his body wastes away he assumes he has plenty of time to do other things and straighten out his life. It’s understandable; he’s only 41, but what a reminder of how short life really is!

After he and I finished filling out his application (me reading the question and repeating it, him giving an answer, me cleaning up that answer and writing it down) I found the rehab program director and asked him what to do with Ronnie’s application, at which point he informed me that I should just give it to him, but that there was no way Ronnie could join the program even just based on the fact that the program guys live on the third floor of a building without an elevator, which would make it hard for Ronnie to stay there. The program director had just felt sorry for Ronnie and couldn’t tell him no when he had asked for the application.

Afterwards, Ronnie was told he had to wait outside until the shelter opened at two, so I found him another sandwich and wheeled him outside. I’m interested to see if he shows up again on Tuesday.