Image via CrunchBaseTheir doctor calls Carrie and Tulane Howard “the ‘Rear Window’ couple.” They spend hours sitting by the bay window, in the house they bought in Northwest Washington, D.C., in 1951, looking out at their garden and beyond it to Rock Creek Park.
“My dogwoods and my azaleas have just finished blooming, and I think this year was the most beautiful,” Mrs. Howard said recently. She’s “90 and one-half,” a retired R.N. who worked in many Washington hospitals, now taking care of her 86-year-old husband, once a biochemist at the National Institutes of Health.
The Howards have between them so many health challenges that they could easily have been among those seniors who constantly revolve in and out of emergency rooms, hospitals and rehab facilities en route to nursing homes.
He’s had Alzheimer’s disease for years, plus an underactive thyroid; for a while, he was overmedicated, lost his appetite and shed an alarming amount of weight. He’s been hospitalized for a blood clot and for hernia surgery. She has survived colon cancer, has developed hypertension and kidney disease, and works to keep her diabetes under control — and of course, she has the stress of caring for her husband. “It’s very taxing, very hard work,” she acknowledged.
But they’re doing rather well, it seems. “They’re enjoying a little renaissance in their 60th year of marriage because they’re a little healthier,” said their doctor, Eric DeJonge, director of geriatrics at Washington Hospital Center. (Actually, it’s their 64th year.)
And part of the reason, Dr. DeJonge is convinced, is that both spouses see the same physician. He visits them at home, with follow-up visits by nurse practitioners and, when necessary, social workers. (I’ll say more about housecalls, an old idea made new again, in a future post.) “It really helps me care for each individual by caring for the whole. They almost become a single unit,” he said in an interview.
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