Just Jo Ken 1: May 2008

Kenneth was in a rehabillitation facility(had been since the 11th of April). Toward the end of March he started falling and had to go in the hospital. He was getting better and the doctor told me on the 2nd of April that they would send him to the center the next day to start rehab (the radiation and chemo had nearly killed him) - he was very weak. The nurses and aides knew they had to help him to the bathroom and stay with him. Before I left that night he had walked down a long hall and back on a walker and did so well I could hardly keep up. I left feeling very good about the situation and felt he would be home in about 2 weeks. That was about 6:45. He called me at 8 and told me one of the aides had let go of him in the bathroom and he fell and they were taking him to x-ray to see if he broke anything. At 10 he called me back and said his hip was broken. He had to lie in one position without moving until 7:30 the next night when they did the surgery on his hip. Then he got pneumonia and a urinary track infection. They sent him to the nursing home on April 11 for rehab. He was doing pretty good even with the broken hip and they had started taking him to the bathroom, then last Sunday morning an aide left him on the commode to do something else and he fell and bunged himself up and that set him back. It seems there was just one setback after another. They were giving him strong vicodin for the pain and it made him just totally out of it for a few days. He was coming around and we had a good visit Sunday. I took Chili and Pepper (our dogs) over there on the front porch - it was the first time they had seen him or him them since he went to the hospital. He held them and Sheila pushed him around the parking lot to the back in the wheelchair and he was holding the leashes. He enjoyed that. Then Cindy, Ginger, McKenna, and Bryan came and he and Bryan discussed the junior/senior prom he had been to the night before and he held McKenna (our 4 month old greatgrandbaby). Yesterday when I went to see him, he was begging me to take him home. It just broke my heart to tell him I could not take him yet. Then I went and talked to the social worker and she said they were going to review his case Thursday to determine whether or not he would be able to rehab. I also started talking to her about taking him home on hospice. When I got home I called the Hospice and they said he definitely would qualify and they would furnish a hospital bed and a wheelchair and teach me how to transport him. Then this morning I was sitting on the couch reading the paper and the phone rang and I could tell it was the nursing home. I thought it was Kenneth (he sometimes called me after breakfast on the phone in the lobby to ask what I was doing and when I would be coming over there), but it was someone named Hope (who had called me before when he fell) and she just said "Your husband expired while in the shower. Where do you want us to send the body" I just went limp. I could not believe my ears. How could he be gone!!!! Am I having a bad dream? But it was real and he really is gone and my heart is broken. I am sure that God will somehow give me strength to get though this. He has been there for me many times before. It is just that I am going to be so lost without Kenneth. He was my rock.

I will always believe that if the hospital had not been negligent and let him break his hip, he would be home now.

Kenneth had a wonderful family - Clarence (Daddy C) and Sophenia (Nanmama) had 5 boys and Kenneth was the middle child. In this family photo Kenneth is on the right back row.

Kenneth was only in the military for 6 months before being honorably discharged but Jo Faye really liked the sight of her husband in a uniform.

Kenneth would own or manage 4 service stations in his home town and always went to work looking great in his uniform.

When the kids were born, Kenneth was so proud and spent a lot of time playing with them. Jo Faye really didn't like it when he held one of her babys up on one hand, but he never dropped them.