Mom’s Nursing Home Today After 20 Months of Lockdowns

Mom's Hand

Medicare/Medicaid finally allowed us today inside my mom’s nursing home. I have not set foot inside since March 14, 2020 when she was abruptly moved from her room into isolation with another lady who was also Covid-19 free. Then she was moved back into another room, not her original one. Her personal belongings and everything that decorated her room and made it more like her own personal space were dropped off wherever the movers could find an empty surface.

I expected to find a spotless room since they have locked them down under Covid-19 pretext for almost two years now.  Instead, I found a filthy room, in bad need of sweeping, mopping, disinfecting, and bathroom cleaning. There was no surface in the room that had been cleaned in quite sometime, much less disinfected for fear of Covid-19 infection.

The air in the room was stale, nobody had opened the window to allow fresh air in since the last time I was here. So many months of visiting through a glass wall, through FaceTime, on the patio six feet apart, or no visitation at all for months on end!

I found out that the housecleaning supervisor had not worked for two weeks. One young woman came into the room, as I was trying to trash two years’ worth of garbage, discarded empty containers littering all over the place, pretending to sweep and mop in the small area left in the middle where there was no trash or no belongings discarded in a hurry long time ago, a year and a half to be exact.

People with dementia keep every wrapper that touches their hands and all disposable containers, newspapers, magazines, calendars, bits of paper, etc.

Pills of dubious origin were scattered on the floor, a sign that the patient, my mom, had spit out some of her pills when the nurses were not watching and nobody came to sweep them away in a long, long time. Some of them were beginning to disintegrate from the air humidity and were turning yellow.

Her clothes and blankets were piled high on plastic boxes and on the dirty dresser and nightstand. The closet was occupied to the top with boxes of diapers. Apparently it had become storage for the nursing floor. None of her clothes were hanging there and looked like the hangers had disappeared long ago.

A trunk by her bed had been smashed into three sections with large cracks showing. The drawers were even worse. The furniture looked like it had been picked up on the side of the road, meant for the garbage dump. Dubious stains that did not come off with Clorox wipes covered most surfaces.

After two hours of hard work, I managed to bring some semblance of normalcy to her room. None of her pictures were on the wall anymore, her bulletin board was stuck in a corner, all her artificial plants were missing, and the live ones had been dead for quite a while. Even the window sill was disgusting and dirty.

There has been no Covid-19 sanitizing in this room ever that I could tell. The new owners, Pro Medica, must not care much about their resident patients and the conditions in which they live.

There were large font bulletins posted everywhere stating that, if the staff is not vaccinated, they must wear both a mask and a shield and must be tested twice a week for Covid-19. I venture to say that it is unnecessary, as the patients are more likely to be killed by the filth surrounding them, both bacterial and viral, because nobody seems to be cleaning or disinfecting much.

I left a message with the administrator; they never answer the phone, they are too busy being Covid-19 compliant every minute of the day. Thank God nobody is sick with Covid-19 but I am not sure about other dangerous infections from the lack of sanitation.

I felt like I traveled back in time and found a filthy socialized medicine hospital in a former Soviet satellite country, that is how bad this nursing home presented itself to visitors. I was the only one for those two hours and I was utterly shocked and disappointed that this exists in America.