Sisters Sandra Smith, left and Linda Trask were able to visit their mother, Caroline Smith, in her room at Edgewood Rehabilitation and Living Center in Farmington once she was placed under hospice care. The sisters would like to see the Maine Center for Disease Control’s guidelines eased for people trying to visit their loved ones before they pass. Photo Courtesy of Sandra Smith
FARMINGTON — Less than a week after East Dixfield resident Caroline B. Smith celebrated her 95th birthday on June 19, she was rushed to Franklin Memorial Hospital due to a heart attack. Her two daughters traveled from out of state and spent the next month navigating COVID-19 visiting restrictions until Smith passed away at Edgewood Rehabilitation and Living Center in Farmington on Aug. 15.
At the hospital, sisters Linda Trask of Brandon, Vermont, and Sandra Smith of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, slept on cots in their mother’s room saying their goodbyes. After eight days, Caroline Smith momentarily recovered and was admitted to a residential physical therapy program at Edgewood.
The sisters would have opted for home care, but their mother would have required a 24-hour nurse, which they could not afford. Edgewood was their best option under the circumstances.
“That was the best place that we felt she would have been happiest and we’re very satisfied with Edgewood. I could recommend them to anybody,” Sandra Smith said in a phone interview from her mother’s home in East Dixfield.
Caroline Smith tested negative two times for the coronavirus and was still placed under a 14-day quarantine upon her arrival at the rehabilitation center. The sisters would visit by standing outside of the building and looking into their mother’s window while a nurse held a phone to her ear.
“Even if you stay six feet away and have masks on, you weren’t even allowed to have the screen open even though it went directly into my mom’s room and only my mom’s room,” Sandra Smith said.
Caroline Smith, who was hard of hearing and seeing, found the restrictions of these visits emotionally draining as she struggled to understand why she couldn’t touch her daughters.
Caroline Smith started asking her daughters, “Can you come in, can you come in?” and she was constantly saying on the phone, “I can’t hear you.”
“She would look at us kind of wistfully and wave and we would do this hug, like an air hug,” Sandra Smith said.
Eventually even the air hug ritual ceased as Trask explained that her mother was not recovering, but losing the energy to even lift her arms.
At one point during her quarantine, Caroline Smith told her daughters from her side of the window that this was worse than the Great Depression, saying, “We were all poor, but at least we had each other.”
The sisters were also suffering emotionally as they yearned to comfort their mother, and they were also nervous about the living conditions at Edgewood without having the opportunity to go in and inspect their mother’s environment.
“It was a concern because you hear all of these things about nursing homes, and when you can’t go in to see how they’re being treated . . .” Sandra Smith said. “It was a lot of stress for us even though we trusted them, because we wanted to go in. In the beginning, Mom was a little unhappy there – the adjustment – because she couldn’t see us and we wanted to make sure everything was OK.”
Both Trask and Sandra Smith reiterated that they were very happy with Edgewood’s care and understood that the employees were simply following the state’s Center for Disease Control (CDC) guidelines.
“Again, it wasn’t any fault of Edgewood,” Trask said in a phone interview. “They were just obeying all of the rules from the laws, and they had to. They didn’t want to lose their license and they didn’t want people to get sick.”
After the 14-day quarantine, the sisters encountered more roadblocks as they tried to visit their mother. Edgewood allowed in-person visits outdoors that were limited to weekdays, with two other people permitted once a week. These visits posed many of the same challenges as the window visits.
Caroline Smith was quite weak and often could not make the trip from her room to Edgewood’s porch or lawn. There was no privacy since a nurse had to accompany the mother. The sisters had to maintain 6 feet of distance and wear face masks, furthering Caroline Smith’s inability to hear her daughters.
Trask felt as though they lost prime moments with their mother when they could have had meaningful conversations and physically comforted her. Instead, Trask thinks that the affection and comfort that they weren’t able to provide for their mother fell on the shoulders of the Edgewood staff.
“They were stressed going home, trying to comfort patients that couldn’t see their loved ones,” Trask said. “They had to fill in the gaps and so they were doing extra duty to try and spend time with patients. So they would go home heartbroken.”
The sisters had a total of three successful, outside visits with their mother before she was moved into a hospice room, where she remained before passing. Edgewood allowed the sisters into Caroline Smith’s room during this time, but Trask said that it was difficult to communicate and visit their mother at that point in her life.
“If it had been a little sooner, we could have talked to her before she got so awful sick. Her breathing was hard. She would kind of pant and so that’d tire her out and she’d sleep so much,” Trask said. “So you don’t have much time with her to ask questions, to talk to help her feel peaceful, to understand what’s happening. Or she may want to give us some instructions about final closures. By the time you’re closer to the end, sometimes you’re on a little bit of morphine or pain stuff, which also affects you being able to be awake a lot and share stuff.”
Sandra Smith described what she is now feeling as post traumatic stress disorder now that she has to recall the number of times her mother asked for comfort and contact, which she was restricted from providing.
“Now that Mom’s gone, we’ve got to live for years with what we went through and I just think that should be exposed and the officials should know it wouldn’t hurt to loosen up in certain ways,” Sandra Smith said.
The sisters said they would have been willing to sign a waiver that they wouldn’t expose anyone else if they had been allowed into their mother’s room earlier. Trask also said that perhaps a separate isolation room could be made available prior to the hospice stage so that families could spend more quality time with each other.
“It seems like if you took extra precautions, you could just go in and touch their hand and talk with them a little bit. I thought she got really depressed and felt alone, terribly isolated,” Trask said. “You know you’re going to die anyway and here you can’t even see your family. It’s really hard. “
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