Living with unexpected turn

They swore to avoid nursing homes. Now a husband must reconsider the decision.

By JUSTIN GEORGE, Times Staff Writer
Published November 6, 2007

Art and Pat Fuxan dance to the soundtrack of "Oklahoma" in her room as part of her physical therapy at Hearthstone at Carrollwood in the where she has lived for the last few months. Physical therapy assistant Frank Trainor starts her dancing at the end of the session then hands her off to Art.
	[Kathleen Flynn | Times]

TAMPA

For 25 years, Art and Pat Fuxan took Communion to Catholics in nursing homes.

They slipped broken bits of wafers onto the tongues of the infirm. Strangers barged in on them with incoherent rants. Everyone seemed lonely. Lifeless eyes stared back.

Art and Pat feared they were looking into their own future.

They promised never to send each other to such a place.

* * *

A psychiatric examination found the reason Pat Fuxan kept chattering and repeating herself. She was losing her memory.

The second oldest of 10, left motherless at 12, Art was used to caring for someone.

He read up on Alzheimer's disease and fed his wife green and yellow vegetables, almonds and fish. He covered strawberries in sugar the way a mother might. He installed rails in the halls and acquired a walker and wheelchair for the woman who had danced since age 3.

They were perfect partners. Art was 5-foot-6. Pat was 5-foot-4.

As teens in 1943 they twirled to People Will Say We're in Love. They danced an encore to the Oklahoma! show tune in 1999, a year after an MRI showed plaque building on Pat's brain. It was their 50th anniversary.

At 81, Art's tough face resembles the late actor Jack Palance, but age shrunk his frame 3 inches. He grimaced as it took eight hours to clean up Pat's messes. He sat her in a lawn chair so he could watch her while he cut the grass. He showered with her because it was the least cumbersome way someone his age could bathe Pat, 80.

His daughter, an assistant physical therapist who works with Alzheimer's patients, urged him to consider a nursing home.

But Art could not break the promise.

"I'm doing what I have to do," he would say.

He realized that Pat was plunging into a state where promises disappeared, leaving his conscience the only mirror to face.

He had survived prostate cancer, but his heart strained at the work.

Tests showed it skipped every third beat. Over the summer, surgeons cleaned out three arteries and inserted a stent.

His doctors told him he could not both recover and care for Pat.

A retired engineer, he tried to be practical and analyze his capabilities. An Eagle Scout, he tried to be honest with himself.

His health was deteriorating. But who else would keep Pat's fingers clean? Who else knew that her eye infections came from rubbing them? He knew she hated blueberries and prunes. He knew to turn the car vent away because she got cold on drives to the doctor.

On Mother's Day, she refused to get out of bed. He knew he had no choice.

"I felt like I was reneging on that promise," he said. "But I realized I had to make a decision with my head, not my heart."

When he drove by Hearthstone Assisted Living center, she told him she didn't want to go. After he signed the contract, he dragged his feet buying her furniture. When her wheelchair crossed the threshold on June 16, he looked away when he saw her face change like a scared, trapped animal.

"Can I come home with you?" she sometimes asks when he visits Room 112.

But every day he goes home alone, where the laundry remains on the couch, the Christmas tree has been up all year and a half-dozen unfinished projects need a wife's prodding.

He wakes up often at night and pats the other side of the bed to see if she's there.

It's a 58-year habit. Some things, he says, are hard to break.

Art Fuxan helped a reporter re-create feelings and conversations he experienced as he wrestled with his wife's care. "Deciding," an occasional series, offers insights on the choices people make.

[Last modified November 5, 2007, 22:49:54]