By Lisa Chmelecki,Staff Writer

Bob Morin was in the worst shape of his life New Year’s Day.

An allergic reaction to one of his medications was causing dark purple blisters to pop up on his calves, his ankles and the soles of his feet.

He couldn’t stay awake for more than 20 minutes at a time.

And, no matter how many sips he took from his bottle of pain medicine, the sting in his chest, the tingling in his arms and the throbbing in his legs persisted.

He spent most of December going from his bed to the recliner in the living room. The days of asking his wife, Jackie, to take him for rides to the supermarket seemed long gone.

He was too tired, too sick to leave the house.

Except for one thing.

On the morning of Saturday, Jan. 1, Morin told his wife that he was going to Our Lady of the Rosary the next morning.

He didn’t explain why, after nearly two years of watching Mass on television, he wanted to go back to the Sabattus church where he and Jackie had taken their six children every Sunday for years.

He simply announced that he was going, and his wife knew not to argue.

“I thought I’d be dead by Monday,” Morin said, relaxing in his recliner more than a month later, “and I wanted to go back to my church one last time.”

Waiting

At the time, Morin was sure that his heart and lungs were finally ready to give out. He wasn’t alone.

His wife was waiting. His kids were, too. Even his hospice nurse and the home health aides who have cared for him during the past two years were sure that he was almost at the end.

“January was bad,” Jackie Morin said. “He was very sick – very, very sick.”

So sick that he asked to speak to each of his children. One by one, he called them into his bedroom, where he asked them to take care of their mother and be good to each other.

Morin also requested a family meeting to remind them he wanted to be cremated. No open casket. No wake. No bench where people could kneel over his body and talk about what a great guy he was.

“If people want to see me,” he told his family, “they can come see me when I’ve alive.”

Needle

Then, in a turn uncommon among most long-term hospice patients, something happened.

Weeks after the parishioners of Our Lady of Rosary lined up to tell him how much they missed him, Morin started to feel better.

His doctors and his hospice nurse had worked together to identify three possible reasons for the sores on his legs: a blood thinner and two blood pressure medications that his body simply couldn’t tolerate any longer.

After they took him off those pills and, instead, put him on antibiotics and steroids, the sores started to dry up. They also changed the way he got his painkillers. Instead of drinking the medicine, he now has it injected directly into his blood through a small needle in his belly.

These days, the 76-year-old retired millworker is feeling stronger than he has in months.

“He’s my little miracle man,” hospice nurse Karen Flynn said, as she knelt beside him to remove one needle from his stomach and stick him with another.

The site of the needle needs to be changed every three days to prevent scar tissue from forming and soaking up the medicine before it reaches his blood.

“Within hours, he would be feeling the effects,” Flynn said.

Still eligible

Flynn has visited Morin about once a week since March 2003, when he became a patient of Androscoggin Home Care & Hospice.

He has lived longer than any of her other patients. Still, she believes – and Bob’s doctors agree – that his heart and lungs have continued to decline steadily, making him eligible to continue receiving hospice services.

For now, Morin and his family have stopped waiting. Morin wants to go to church again. And that’s not his only plan.

Soon after Flynn changed his needle, he sat up in his recliner, winked at his wife, then pretended to cast a fishing line and reel it back in.

lchmelecki@sunjournal.com

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