How a Trib reporter is coping with inability to visit mother during coronavirus uncertainty

My darkest fear is the Pittsburgh-area personal care home where my mom is living will be a death trap if the coronavirus finds its way in.

My second fear — which has arrived — is that I won’t be able to visit her.

Is the reality that she is simply at risk just by living and being old with multiple health issues? Can she be made safer at the personal care home?

It’s a scary and unknown situation. Authorities in Washington state report that 19 of the deaths in the state are associated with a nursing home, Life Care Center of Kirkland.

My mom is a target for this coronavirus. She is 81 with renal disease requiring dialysis three times a week outside of the personal care home. Then, there’s the heart disease. She has survived beyond her and our expectations.

But is this threat as scary and inevitable as it sounds?

I find there is no comfort, only more concern, more questions and not enough time to ask them and do the research, that as a reporter, I should be good at. But I can’t find my answers and I’m looking hard. And I feel there is little that I can do.

This all became an issue pretty quickly in only five days.

It was just Sunday when my siblings and I — with our typical, complicated work schedules — couldn’t take my mom out of the personal home for a Sunday dinner. We try each week, while she’s still mobile, to get her out into the world. It could be dinner at a restaurant or a visit with family. If not, we try to visit her.

Given the failed efforts over the weekend, I do a mom reboot on Monday. She is not happy that we did not see her and is complaining about the cold french fries she was served for lunch at the home.

No one is happy.

How about a visit with angel hair pasta with homemade white clam sauce? Her favorite. Yes! I stop by an Italian grocery and buy fresh pasta and make preparations. Only hours later, my plans are quashed.

I cannot see my mom this week — and might not see my mom for a long time.

I learned that visitations at her personal care home are now suspended. And besides her dialysis appointments, it is highly recommended she not leave the home for fear of exposures to coronavirus. My God, what about her hair appointments?

When I discussed this with her, she totally understood the personal care home lockdown. I asked if she would want me to drop off food then have someone warm it up in some microwave?

No. She doesn’t trust people en masse to wash their hands. “I’ve been to a lot of football games at Three Rivers Stadium and watched those women come out of those stalls and run out not washing their hands,” she said. “Dreadful,” she added, for good measure.

She totally gets it. She knows how easily the flu makes its rounds in the personal care home.

Then there’s that stoicism that comes with remembering that she lost one of her grandmothers in the 1918 flu pandemic.

So whatever it takes to batten down the hatches, she is complying unflinchingly.

But the waiting and logistics are still hard and murky, and I hope not heartbreaking.

The home’s head of nursing told me Thursday that my mom is a high risk for the coronavirus, given her multiple health conditions. I request that she wear a mask while leaving the home, via wheelchair, then an Allegheny County Access van when she is taken to dialysis.

She’s already wearing one. But will it work? We keep hearing that the people who should wear it are the ones who are sick, who should not spew their saliva into the air. What happens to my mom when she is in an Access van and other people are there? What about the other people at dialysis?

Please don’t touch anything, I tell her. She already knows that. Even if everything goes right, will that virus still get to her?

Will I get to see my mother again soon? I just don’t know.