Mom's Hand |
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.
Ileana, my similar experience was from visiting my (out of state) mother in the guarded entry "high risk" wing of "assisted living" more than a decade ago. There the staff kept the rooms in some order by locking their clients out of their rooms for most of the day! As memory serves -- and as you can well imagine, that situation led to its own unpleasant and unhealthful consequences. These places profit from any lack of oversight. (That would include the times I brought gifts, e.g., decorations, etc., to be enjoyed by the bored residents, gifts that promptly disappeared from their area.) So COVID-19 was the perfect setup for them.
ReplyDeleteI am so sorry that you are experiencing this.
Arlene
Dear Doctor Paugh,
ReplyDeleteKnowing that you are familiar with Nazism and Communism and their harsh rule over Romania and other European Countries last Century, is there any advice you can give to United States citizen’s regarding how to peacefully, but firmly, stand up to the oppression of the far-left socialists in our country to really make a difference in avoiding falling under their influence?
Thank you for the work you do. Keep up the effort.
Respectfully,
Richard and Shirley Jackson