Within the space of a day or two this week, I heard about three different yet linked stories about death, aging and love.
One of my closest friends called to tell me that her and her husband's beloved middle-aged cat, Dexter, has fallen ill with cancer.
Through the e-mail grapevine, I heard that another friend's lovely older dog, Rudy, who has been sick with a mysterious ailment for weeks, is on the mend though her owner is gasping, albeit uncomplainingly, under the weight of emergency vet bills.
And an old friend, Ursula Hart, who runs an animal sanctuary north of Toronto and from whom I adopted a dog years ago, phoned to update me on her mother.
Ursula has been calling periodically the last while as she struggled to get reasonable care in her local hospital, Stevenson Memorial in Alliston, Ont., for her mom, who is 84-year-old Hilda Conley.
Hers is a long, complicated tale, as such stories tend to be, but two things are important to know.
The first is that Ursula is a remarkably self-sufficient woman.
I remember the first time I saw her take her dogs - then about 50 of them, the unloved, unwanted and abandoned of the area - for a walk on her country property. When she held up a hand, they'd all stop; when she waved, they'd all sit: It was like watching a dog infantry unit cheerfully going through its paces.
Ursula has always managed her animals and her life with minimal help. In the many years I've known her, I've never heard a whiney note in her voice. She is not a complainer.
The second thing is that I am not unfamiliar with the care given the human elderly, having gone through it many years ago with my father, and more recently with my mother.
I know from first-hand experience that while health care is still generally good in certain parts of the Canadian system - emergency rooms, ICUs, specialty units - it tends to be uniformly mediocre, at best, in the general medicine wards where old people are warehoused.
Some time ago, Ursula's mother was diagnosed with a benign tumour and two cysts in her brain, but when the cysts were drained of fluid, she made an astonishing recovery. She was due to have this procedure done again when she was admitted to Stevenson in February with a minor bladder infection.
Hilda, Ursula says, was no frail old lady, but fully mobile, 150 pounds and full of spunk when she entered the hospital. She had just had her long, still-coppery hair cut to donate a thick braid of it to a charity fundraiser.
The infection treated, Mrs. Conley was due to be released on a Saturday when the hospital decided to keep her in for the weekend for a swallowing test the following Monday. But over the weekend, staff did a version of it on their own, Mrs. Conley choked, and a blood vessel broke in her head.
She fell into a coma, and there she stayed for about 10 days.
Almost immediately, she was written off as "palliative," which meant the care she got went from mediocre to lousy.
Ursula visited every day, lobbying for her mother to be given a feeding tube, trying to make the staff understand that her mom A) wanted to live, as evidenced by the fact she had emerged from the coma and begun speaking again and B) deserved a chance to get better, given her previous condition.
For five weeks, Ursula says, the hospital refused, and Mrs. Conley was basically left to starve, her only nourishment an intravenous drip.
Rudely, she refused to die.
She also began to develop bed sores on her previously strong, un-old-lady skin; Ursula began asking for a special bed or mattress, for the dressings to be changed more often, to no avail.
She would arrive some evenings to find the staff had skipped a scheduled feeding or two; once, hearing her mother wheezing, Ursula found and removed an enormous plug of hardened phlegm from the back of her mom's throat.
She went up the chain of command, trying to convince the hospital her mother should be sent to a rehab facility, where she might receive proper wound care and physiotherapy. No, they said, she had but two choices: Send her mother to a nursing home or take her home. If she stayed in hospital any longer, she would have to pay, because Mrs. Conley was deemed fit for discharge.
This was invariably accompanied by the smarmy advice that Ursula had best come to terms with her mother's death.
This woman works every day with animals; few are as familiar with and accepting of the inevitable cycle of life as she is.
Dexter the cat was sent home with steroids, which may buy him some comfortable time; Rudy the dog may be out next week. Dexter's care is essentially palliative; Rudy's is not. No one at either facility has suggested to their owners that the animals aren't worth the respective efforts; certainly, no one has tried to starve them.
Mrs. Conley was discharged this Monday, with her biggest bedsore now the size of a fist, and is home with Ursula. Wound care is allegedly going to happen but nothing has materialized so far; home care is erratic.
Annette Jones, Stevenson's vice-president and a seemingly kind person, said Friday that the hospital is "very deeply regretful and truly apologetic" for sending Mrs. Conley home in that condition. An investigation into her care is already under way.
I told her that it shouldn't take a phone call from a newspaper reporter to prompt this minimal sort of reaction, and she agreed.
In the meantime, Ursula is on her own, with her 300 animals to look after, and her dear old mom.
The irony, o cruel irony, is that many years ago, Hilda Conley worked for the Ontario predecessor of medicare, the Ontario Medical Services Insurance Plan. She probably considered it noble work. Fat lot of good it did her.