Florence Bauman

Welcome to Florence's CaringBridge website. We are using it to keep family and friends updated in one place on her recent cancer diagnosis. We appreciate your support and words of hope and encouragement. Thank you for visiting.

Here’s a little background on Mom’s condition.  It mostly started a week ago.  January 1st was on Sunday, and Mom didn’t have the energy to go to church, and this is very unusual for her.  Rosemary Bauman, who is a registered nurse and a Sister-in-law to Mom, came over to check on her.  Rosemary felt she was sick enough that she needed to be seen.  After consulting with a family member they decided she should go into Urgent Care in Willmar.  Since Sunday was New Year’s Day, Urgent Care wasn’t open, so Rosemary took her to the Emergency Department at Rice Hospital.  They checked her over and ran some additional tests.  One of the tests was to do some imaging of her body.  The imaging showed that her liver was three times the normal size and that it was covered with cancer.

Up until that day she had been doing, actually, quite well.  We had been noticing an increase in her memory issues, but nothing dramatic.  On Friday December 30th, I, Bob, was in Kerkhoven.  I usually go to Mom’s for lunch, but this day Mom called and said she was too tired to fix lunch and asked if I’d mind going to the café for lunch and then just stop over and visit sometime.  This is very unusual for her to not want to fix lunch and visit.  I stopped over after lunch to check on her.  She was tired, but she asked if I would take her into Willmar to get her driver’s license renewed… really??? You want to get your driver’s license renewed at 91?  I took her in and she actually did very well.  She passed the vision test without using her glasses.

After finding out she had cancer, several action items started to be put in place.  Family members started staying with her so she was being watched over most of the
time.  We had started the process of finding a health care facility for her in Willmar, but hadn’t gotten formal approval for her yet.  Jim and Ginny worked hard to get her into a facility as quickly as we could.  She moved into Bethesda Nursing Home on Friday the 6th of January, 2017.