The Chaska Historical Society will be hosting a free, family friendly, Old Time Medicine Show Reenactment at 1 p.m. at the Chaska History Center on Sept. 15 and Sept. 23.
By the time Bob Thoms, a retired engineer, entered long-term care, he had already experienced a series of harrowing health crises. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in his late 50s, then lymphoma a few months later. In the wake of chemotherapy, his cognitive abilities began to deteriorate. Doctors chalked it up to “chemo brain.” “He just wasn’t him anymore,” his younger brother, Bill, says. Around the same time, undergoing surgery for a perforated ulcer, Bob flatlined on the operating table and was technically dead for six minutes.
Bob lived alone in an apartment on Wellesley Street. Bill and their sister, Susan Hynes, checked in on him several times a week. After Bob inexplicably tossed a lit cigarette down the garbage chute of his building, causing a fire, they realized they couldn’t provide the level of care he needed. He hated the first home they put him in too many old people, he said so they moved him to Guildwood, a long-term care facility in Scarborough. It seeme