Ron SmithPublished on A Frightening Experience
A Frightening Experience
Instead of starting my new series of articles on aging-in-place this month, I want to discuss a very personal excursion that my family recently experienced into the world of unintentional isolation. Isolation has been identified as one of the biggest challenges to seniors and I will allocate an entire article on this topic in the coming months to more thoroughly address the topic.
Over the past weeks, I have experienced firsthand the impact of unintentional isolation. In this case, it was an isolation caused by COVID. Our older son was recently discharged from the hospital after a month-long battle with the virus. For about 2 ½ weeks of the hospital stay, there was very little communication possible between us due to hospital COVID restrictions and his treatment protocol. For our family, these were the scariest weeks of our lives. We had no idea whether our son would live or die. We weren’t able to know whether he was improving or getting worse.
For our son it was even worse. He was in a medication/COVID induced fog. He didn’t know what was real and what was imagined. As far as he knew, he could have been in the middle of a staged scenario from a Mission Impossible movie. He had no reference points that he could trust. Was he really in a hospital? One day, he asked to speak with someone from the Security Department because he works with security in his job and trusts them. In isolation, our minds can play awful tricks on us!
I thought I understood what isolation was about. This COVID induced form of isolation proved that I wasn’t even close! Other COVID survivors and individuals with recent hospital stays have confirmed this same kind of scenario. COVID protocols have forced many of us into a world of isolation. There are two points to share from this experience: COVID is very real, and isolation is very scary if not incapacitating for some.
If you have a friend or know someone that is going through COVID or just living alone, reach out to them. Make contact periodically to see how they are doing and bring a friendly, comforting voice to their daily routine. Share a piece of your life with them and make sure that they are doing okay. Physical isolation or the lack of human contact are like torture for some. I ask you to reach out not just because of COVID but on an ongoing basis to those living on their own, those in nursing homes or those just living apart from their families. If you personally can’t make the contact, try to connect the person with a local organization that can help. Isolation can be extremely disabling for some regardless of the cause and we need to seek out those caught in such situations. My personal experience has provided me and my family with a valuable insight. I felt the need to share this with you now to help arouse a better awareness of the problem. We will talk more in the coming months about strategies to minimize the impact of isolation on yourself, your friends and your loved ones. We’ll also contrast self-imposed isolation from unintentional isolation.
Ron Smith is a Maricopa resident and an aging-in-place advocate. He is a member of the Age-Friendly Maricopa Advisory Committee, a member of the Maricopa Senior Coalition and a certified Aging-in-Place specialist (CAPS).
This article appeared in the February 2021 issue of InMaricopa Magazine.
