The Nursing Home Lockdowns Debacle

Reporting on incompetent care and abusive treatment of the elderly in nursing homes was always necessary but more so during the Covid-19 lockdowns. 

During the three years of the pandemic (March 14, 2020 -June 9, 2022) while my mother was in the Manor Care Nursing facility in Fairfax, Virginia, I have seen and reported abuses and neglect to the nursing administrator and to the Virginia Ombudsman. 

I had my mom’s best interest at heart and the interest of all the other patients locked up 24/7 away from the world and their loved ones who wished to visit them.

Visitors were not allowed, only staff members, yet the patients kept getting sick with Covid and some had died despite vaccinations.

The first attempt of the nursing home to give families a glimpse of their locked-up loved ones consisted of masked patients lined up on the sidewalk in their respective wheelchairs, while their families drove around in a circle to wave at them and say hello.

Someone had made a large sign praising the working staff for their “heroism.” I personally have quite a different view and definition of “heroism” and it does not involve medical staff that knowingly forced a harmful injection on innocent elderly patients who did not understand what was being done to them and were not allowed to give consent. And most families contacted were just as ignorant when they did give consent.

After weeks of continued lockdown, I negotiated 10 minutes a week of Facetime with my mom. It did not work too well, since she had dementia, she thought I was someone on TV and her attention wondered.

Next the administrator allowed me to speak to my mom through the thick window in the lobby. She made 15-minute appointments per week, my mom was brought in the lobby, she sat in her wheelchair on the other side of the glass and I stood outside in the blazing sun or in the snow, depending on the season. We talked through smart phones because the sound did not carry well through the glass.

Finally, after much negotiating and mild threatening on my part, the administrator allowed my mom to be brought outside on the patio for 30 minutes in the sunshine and fresh air, but I had to keep my six feet distance with a mask on and mom had to be masked as well. When the weather turned cold, I was allowed with her in the conference room in the lobby, both masked up.

When Manor Care eventually opened up patients' rooms to visits, the squalor and filth I found shocked me. All her possessions and clothes were piled up in a corner of the room.

When the owners had descended on the nursing home at the first lockdown, they had hurriedly moved all patients in one day, two by two, sick ones together and healthy ones together.

They hastily and carelessly removed everyone’s personal possessions and threw them in a corner on the floor. The move became a huge and unnecessary infectious wave as the rooms previously occupied by sick patients now infected the healthy ones moved into sickly rooms improperly sanitized and sterilized. 

They did not care, they just wanted the optics, to appear that they were doing something helpful. So, mom was moved into such a room previously occupied by her friend Maria who was terribly sick at that moment with Covid, and I knew it.

When I was finally allowed in mom’s room, I spent endless hours cleaning it, disposing of trash, putting all her clothes in proper order, discarding the shards of broken glass and plastic possessions, and making sure everything was properly laundered. Most of her valuable possessions were gone.

Was she properly fed? Based on the amount of weight she lost during the lockdown, they must’ve just put the plate in front of her but dementia patients forget to eat, they have to be fed. Was she given enough water? Did she remember to drink the large glass per day she received?

Mom survived the Covid only to be killed by uncaring CNAs and nurses who did not give her life saving antibiotics for an ordinary UTI which turned septic. I learned that lives in a nursing home are not valued much by the staff. And the more a family member held them to account, the worse they treated their loved ones left behind after the family visit ended.

Was it a good idea to isolate the elderly to such a degree that in some places families could not even attend their funerals? Was it ethical to mistreat dementia patients because they did not like being held to task by family? Of course not, but it happened to my mom.

Joseph Hickey and Dennis G. Rancourt looked at policies typically addressing “vulnerable individuals concentrated in centralized care facilities and entail limiting social contacts with visitors, staff members, and other care home residents” in a recent study published on October 30, 2023,  titled, Predictions from standard epidemiological models of consequences of segregating and isolating vulnerable people into care facilities.

“Across a large range of possible model parameters including degrees of segregation versus intermingling of vulnerable and robust individuals, we find that concentrating the most vulnerable into centralized care facilities virtually always increases the infectious disease attack rate in the vulnerable group, without significant benefit to the robust group.” Predictions from standard epidemiological models of consequences of segregating and isolating vulnerable people into care facilities | PLOS ONE

Common sense dictates that such isolation is not good for human beings for many reasons, including the lack of fresh air, sunshine, limited human contact, lack of proper care and nutrition in the absence of inspection, and a filthy environment in their isolated rooms where cleaning and sanitation were seldom done, citing a reduced staff.

Hickey and Rancourt’s study concluded that “isolated care homes of vulnerable residents are predicted to be the worse possible mixing circumstances for reducing harm in epidemic or pandemic conditions.”

At the end of the day, I knew that there was no science behind the Covid lockdowns, we were being used in a huge and failed experiment. And President Trump gave Drs. Fauci and Brix an endless platform to terrorize the population into compliance. The only silver lining was that the authoritarian government had not welded shut apartment complex doors like they did in China. Yet we were forced to wear masks outdoors in large state parks with no other humans in sight. As someone aptly wrote, "we were guinea pigs in a failed experiment."

Pro Medica's Perennial Lockdowns

I got a phone call this morning from a young lady named Martina, reading a canned corporate script which made her sound like a recording, apologizing, and blaming a computer glitch for not contacting families whose loved ones are residents in the Pro Medica-owned nursing homes.

I picked up the phone and she was none too pleased when I interrupted her prepared and written speech with annoying but logical questions. This was the second call on behalf of the corporate office in Colorado since the lockdowns started on March 14, 2020.

She informed me that last week there were zero positive Covid tests among staff and residents, yet they must wait another week of zero [a worthless test deemed so by the CDC] before they may hear from the health department to release them from lockdown.

They are the only nursing home chain in Fairfax County that is keeping their residents prisoners under a false pretense when nobody has been sick with Covid-19 lately at this facility, only one or two staff and a resident were positive but asymptomatic, according to various staff members.

The staff is being forced to wear masks and shields and the residents wear masks, even those who live alone in their rooms and do not leave their rooms.

I explained to the young woman that I have just returned from Florida and few people were masked there, mostly tourists from New York and other liberal states. The locals were getting sunshine, vitamin D, and fresh salty air. Florida flu cases had dropped to one of the lowest levels in the country.

I asked Martina, since the flu season is starting as the cold fall and winter seasons are moving in, prime time for any type of flu, are they going to keep everyone locked down in perpetuity as it is impossible to keep the population at zero flu cases? Her answer was, of course not. However, she could not tell me what the company’s plans were. I asked her about the facility’s death statistics, and she told me that she did not have those numbers, only corporate does. Who exactly does have those numbers at corporate? Not surprisingly, she did not know.

Martina did say that they must wait on the health department of Virginia and the CDC guidelines before they can allow patients to be free again. All the other nursing homes have been allowing visitations for weeks now while Pro Medica is keeping their nursing home patients under draconian lockdown.

Criminals in prison are treated better and have more freedoms than these patients have. As I tried to argue my point, it was ignored, Martina was only interested in reading the prepared script to me in its totality and did not like to be interrupted.

The insanity of these controlling people with their manufactured pandemic is appalling. Zoo people in Tampa, Florida, are giving Covid-vaccine to skunks because this gain-of-function flu virus is found both in animals and humans.

Covid-19 will never be eradicated among humans like the polio was. The polio virus hosted only in humans, never in animals, it was therefore possible to eradicate it in most western countries.

Are cases of previously eradicated viruses like polio coming back? Perhaps from third world nations, whose citizens are now pouring through our non-existent southern border, individuals who are neither tested nor forced to be vaccinated against their will like American citizens are.

Flu viruses mutate constantly. That is why each year people get a flu shot with a concoction of what pharma thinks may or may not be effective this year, with a success rate of below 50 percent. Are people in nursing homes in the U.S. and elsewhere in places like Australia going to be locked down for the rest of their remaining lives?

Something does not compute when the same people who told us that the earth is overpopulated and we must be culled down to less than a billion, are now trying to save our lives with a vaccine.

 

The Forgotten Casualties of Covid-19: The Abandoned Resident in Nursing Homes

As people fight each other in stores, public places, streets, and parks over the governments’ unconstitutional mandate for healthy people to wear masks in stifling heat, indoors, outdoors, in their own cars alone, or start fights with perfect strangers they insult for their selfishness that endangers their fragile health and existence in the air space they breathe, how dare they pollute the air that may kill them with a deadly virus, and snitch on perfect strangers on websites and to employers because their employees dare to wear the mask improperly below their noses or took it off to answer the phone in order to be heard by the other party on the line, a large group of a different kind of Covid-19 victims is being ignored – people in nursing homes.

The elderly in nursing homes have health issues that are not being properly addressed. Some die alone and are buried hurriedly without any loved ones present. Some residents are Covid-negative, some are Covid-positive asymptomatic, and some have long recovered from their bout with pneumonia.

Residents are locked up away from their relatives and friends, unable to go to the specialists they need, unable to even get out to the parking lot in their wheelchairs to get fresh air and sunshine. Upon return from such a potential trip, they would have to be isolated for 14 days.

These forgotten Americans are denied trips to the barber or the beauty salon.  They cannot go out to have a meal with their families in a restaurant, they must stay locked up indefinitely.

Some residents have incipient dementia and do understand and feel more deeply the non-ending isolation and abandonment. Others have a more severe form of dementia and do not understand what is going on, why they cannot open the windows or why they cannot come out of their rooms anymore, why they cannot wheel themselves on the corridors to visit with other residents, to have more human contact than just the nurse on duty or the CNA taking care of them for that week.

Families kept at bay can only imagine the fear and frustration of their loved ones who believe that they have been abandoned for good, never seeing a familiar and loved face in months.

Residents are not allowed any activities, no church services, no stimulation from human contact, no visitors reading to them, talking to them, or praying with them. Phone calls are seldom answered. The nurses and other caretakers are too busy, afraid to go to work, and overwhelmed, we were told.

The nursing home administrator blames the mighty Health Department who oversees the fate of the nursing home residents. The home is blameless and there is only so much they can do to keep the loved ones comfortable. I cannot imagine how comfortable a resident is who has been in lockdown since mid-March to the point that they cannot leave their rooms and all doors must be shut.

Virginia’s first district, Rep. Rob Wittman, assured families that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have announced new initiatives “designed to protect nursing home residents from coronavirus.” He and Rep. Abigail Spanberger (VA-07) have asked the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to “provide increased emergency funding to all long-term care facilities, in addition to the nearly $4.9 billion distribution to nursing home facilities impacted by Covid-19 which he supported.”

HHS authorized $5 billion relief fund to “Medicare-certified long-term care facilities and state veterans’ homes, to build nursing home skills and enhance response to COVID-19, including enhanced infection control.”

CMS will now require, not just recommend, that “all nursing homes in states with a 5% positivity rate or greater test all nursing home staff each week, identifying asymptomatic carriers. More than 15,000 testing devices will be deployed over the next few months to help support this mandate.”

The Trump administration “deployed federal Task Force Strike Teams to provide onsite technical assistance and education to nursing homes experiencing outbreaks in an effort to reduce transmission and the risk of Covid-19 spread among residents.” The teams are composed of “clinicians and public health personnel from CMS, CDC, and the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health.”  

Since the residents are locked up in their rooms and families are not allowed in, it is obvious that the spread occurs from the staff and caretakers in the nursing homes.

Since May 2020, CMS and CDC have collected weekly data on each nursing home and numbers of Covid-19 cases. The compiled data reached the White House and CMS will send to states a list of nursing homes with an increase in cases each week, thus outlining the highest risk nursing homes.  https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/press-releases/trump-administration-announces-new-resources-protect-nursing-home-residents-against-covid-19

In the meantime, while you are hysterically afraid to go to work in your cushy government office, your classroom composed of low risk students, are afraid to eat in a restaurant, or are afraid to come anywhere near another human being before having an irrational meltdown, think about the nursing home residents who have not left their locked-down rooms and buildings since mid-March and their families have not seen them.

Covid-19 Nursing Homes Neglect

My mom’s mental and physical health has deteriorated enormously in the last four months of the forced lockdown in her nursing home. They were kept isolated and bed-ridden without the benefit of any exercise or even wheelchair self-strolling.

The staff lost her dentures for the seventh time in four years and a trip to the dentist did not help as her jaw muscles were too weak to bite down to make imprints for new dentures.  Leg muscles, and most muscles in general have atrophied from lack of movement.

By order of the Virginia Health Department, they shuffled the elderly from the rooms they knew into unknown rooms previously occupied by other patients sick with the flu.

The entire move was done in one day, hardly enough time to sterilize the rooms properly. They hurriedly threw some of their belongings in plastic bags and put them on the floor in the new rooms with a roommate.

The single occupancy rooms were dedicated to Covid-19 patients’ isolation. Of the 101 residents, 76 tested positive for Covid-19 and 26 did not. Most who tested positive were asymptomatic.

Mom was tested twice for Covid-19 and came up negative both times. But she got pneumonia from the flu even though she had a mandatory flu shot. Thankfully, she recovered, her second bout with pneumonia in three years.

Eventually eight people died of underlying multiple illnesses but were marked as Covid-19. One man was 100 years old. In the best of times, caretakes and underpaid careless facility cleaners carry bacteria and viruses from room to room.

Recently, the nursing home resumed admission of new patients, but former residents are still in lockdown and families are not allowed to see them.

Among the many sad lessons, I learned from this flu epidemic called a “pandemic,” was how poorly and inhumanely the elderly were treated in nursing homes.

Jon Rappaport called the Covid-19 the “nursing home disaster.” He wrote that it was “mass murder by cruelty,” and by painful physical isolation, lack of mental stimulation, and loneliness. He added that “The excess mortality of 2020 is largely the result of elderly people dying in nursing homes.”

He explained, “it has nothing to do with a virus, it has to do with patients who are already on a long downward health slide---then hit with the terror of an arbitrary and fake Covid-19 diagnosis, and then isolated and shut off from family and friends---in facilities where gross neglect and indifference are all too often the ‘standard of care.’”

I can certainly attest to the neglect and slowly delivered care despite my weekly insistence. Under the best of times, mom was neglected. Now I cannot have access to her at all, I have no idea of her level of care. There are some good nurses who care about their patients but most of them do not stay long, replaced by foreign caretakers who do not relate to our standards of medicine.

It is easy to overcome nursing home patients with terror and isolation. When I asked to take mom outside for a stroll for fresh air and sunshine, even wearing gloves and a mask, I was told that she would have to be put in isolation for 14 days if I did that. But if she would go out into the world for a doctor’s visit, that would be approved.

And the elderly locked down at home, scared to death by the non-stop media COVID-19 panic, died alone and isolated, afraid to call 911 for help. Those who did go to the hospital, were intubated immediately with breathing ventilators, heavily sedated with several drugs, never came out of sedation to breathe on their own again and died.

Forbes reported on May 22, that in 43 states, “42% of all COVID-19 deaths have taken place in nursing homes and assisted living facilities.” The excess mortality allegedly came from nursing homes and the use of ventilators in hospitals. https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/05/26/nursing-homes-assisted-living-facilities-0-6-of-the-u-s-population-43-of-u-s-covid-19-deaths/#46e33a6074cd

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) looked at charts of 5,700 patients with Coronavirus infections who were hospitalized in 12 hospitals in New York City and the patients’ outcome based on age, sex, and co-morbidities. The mortality rate on ventilators was 88.1 percent.  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32320003/

More About Nursing Homes

Caring for our elderly in nursing homes has become a profitable and very expensive industry that few dare to talk about. It speaks to the resilience of some elderly who remain alive despite the abuse and neglect they experience in nursing homes.

Some nurses and assistants start out and remain caring despite the long hours, the low pay, the back-breaking work, and the unrewarding environment. Other staff members do not care and abuse or neglect patients in front of their loved ones.

Perhaps Americans don’t want to work as CNAs because the pay is low and the hours are long. Many immigrants, legal or illegal, are more than happy to fill the vacuum.  One thing is certain, as I’ve experienced for the last four years in a nursing home in Fairfax, the work ethic in this new wave of immigrants leaves a lot to be desired. There are always a few remarkable exceptions.

Recently one nurse’s aide dropped a patient she attempted to hoist with a broken device, the patient fell and was injured, but she never filed an incident report. She was hoping nobody would find out as the patient spoke only Spanish. The next day the patient was covered in bruises but without broken bones.

I arrived one day to pick up my mom for her doctor’s appointment. She was in wet socks, no shoes, her shirt was on backwards and food-stained, she needed a diaper change, and the male nurse handled her roughly causing her unnecessary pain and suffering radiating from the hip which had been recently operated on. And the nurse helping her did all of this right in front of me. Can you imagine what they do to patients in the absence of relatives?

There is an ombudsman in the nursing home to represent the patients but patients and relatives are afraid to report anything wrong for fear of staff retaliation. I learned the hard way that, every time I would report a bad incident, the nursing staff would treat mother much worse.

Many elderly are so sick, they never say ‘thank you’ or smile even though they may be grateful that they are being taken care of – they are in so much pain to remember to be polite. Other patients no longer know who they are.

Some elderly patients don’t have any relatives; others do but nobody comes to visit, life keeps them busy. Yet many have relatives who do come to visit but never bring as much as a warm blanket which they desperately need because the nursing home blankets are never warm enough in winter. A few only visit at Christmas time to make sure they are still in the will.

The elderly, who have their mental faculties but are immobile, are often depressed despite the bingo, occasional music, ice cream social, and other activities organized by the nursing home. Television becomes the only mental stimulation some may have. A few read Bibles and others wheel themselves in the hallway watching the world go by.

They cannot leave the floor without an elevator code and they have heavy alarm bracelets. Those with their mental faculties who are semi-mobile have hospital armbands with information which tells the outside world that they are patients in the nursing home. It is a loss of freedom that is not unlike being an inmate in a prison. On the other hand, a few patients do not have a clear legal status so they need these bracelets.

Depending on the time of day, there is always a permeating smell of urine and feces mixed in with the smells of food and disinfectant. Diapers, trips to the bathroom, and showers are never done timely because there are too many patients assigned per CNA. And if the CNAs do not take their jobs seriously, they compound existing problems in the quest of earning a paycheck.

Many elderly refuse showers for various reasons, the major one being that the water is really cold most of the time, making it a frigid and painful experience, particularly in wintertime. The elderly are usually cold and should be showered with much warmer water.  I had to shower my mom in the nursing home and the water was lukewarm even though I let it run for quite some time.

The lack of timely diaper changes and showers cause a lot of UTIs in the elderly female population. Cross-contamination occurs because not all of the staff understands bacterial transmission through contaminated gloves not changed between patients.

Other staff members are really hard-working but the job gets to them eventually after seeing so much pain and misery.  The last chapters of our human lives are not pretty and are made worse by chronic disease and pain.

The indignity of incontinence is very hard to deal with in a fully grown adult. It is difficult sometimes to change the diaper of a small baby, can you imagine changing the diapers of adults who cannot be placed on a changing table and are often combative?

Five star facilities can be abusive and neglectful too. Many reject people who do not speak English under the pretense that they cannot meet their needs. It is a subtle form of discrimination. 

Most people cannot afford the $7,000 per month assisted living fees or the $12,000 per month in-home care. Insurance does not even begin to cover such outrageous costs. Medicaid pays nursing homes a little over $6,500 a month for their patients that require specialized nursing care which is just about everybody already there.

The Alzheimer patients are separated in a locked area unfortunately called Arcadia. Many are ambulatory and would disappear without a trace if left to their own devices.

Western societies are supposed to deal with their elderly in a more humane way but, in the process of insuring that they are taken care of, the family may suffer terrible financial burden even with two income-earners. And they cannot possibly care for the really sick loved ones who need shots, blood drawn, emergency trips to the nearest ER, and other measures to save that patient’s life.

Because they do not want to be a burden on their loved ones, many choose to have a do not resuscitate (DNR) order in their wills and others move to countries that allow euthanasia. They prefer those measures as opposed to lingering in a nursing home and be forgotten, neglected, and abused while in pain.

Rhonda, not her real name, was blind, unable to talk, and on dialysis for several years before she passed in her sleep. She wailed from the top of her lungs all day long.  She was transported twice a week to have her blood cleaned. Her tiny bony frame was covered in large, purple bruises from the dialysis needles.  

Some societies use the entire tribe to care for the elderly in the last part of their lives. They treat them with love, dignity, and the respect they deserve.

A Nordic country allows students to live in a wing of the nursing home, rent free, as long as they adopt an elderly person and interact with them on a daily basis.

But many patients who still have their faculties prefer visits from and time spent with their loved ones. They don’t want much as they near the end of the lives, just their children’s, grandchildren’s, or siblings’ time.

HCR ManorCare Bankruptcy and Patients

One of the largest nursing home chains in the U.S., HCR ManorCare Inc. has filed for bankruptcy protection on March 4, 2018 in the Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware.  Quality Care Properties Inc., HCR’s landlord, will take control of the company.

The private-equity firm Carlyle Group owns HCR ManorCare Inc. The departing CEO, Paul Ormond received $115 million in deferred compensation and severance even though HCR is approximately $230 million in debt.

HCR missed numerous rent payments even though Quality Care Properties Inc. agreed to multiple temporary reductions in such payments. Last August QCP took legal action and sued “to replace the company’s management and to appoint a receiver with the power to collect rent.”

The plan of reorganization filed with the bankruptcy court stipulates that the operating business will stay out of bankruptcy and Carlyle’s equity stake will be wiped out.

As per chapter 11 bankruptcy rules, HCR ManorCare will pay all creditors, vendors, and suppliers in full and on time with the exception of QCP. HCR blamed its problems on low reimbursement rates from government health programs.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “The Company, which employs 50,000 people, last year posted a pretax loss of $267.9 million on revenue of $3.7 billion, 82% of which derived from the long-term care business. HCR ManorCare listed $4.3 billion in total assets and $7.1 billion in total liabilities, debt and financing obligations, in court filings.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/hcr-manorcare-files-for-bankruptcy-1520261353?emailToken=3e08c926ad937feb42c06a6e927e293e9epWtsVf4xiOTCAmih%2FzF90OQmpFg%2FwrZe27eRUH2LN9hFhst1liU6fj2rUQEqSWwLOngxtntQr57quk37ilag%3D%3D

When the ownership transfer will be completed, the current Chief Executive Steven Cavanaugh will be replaced by Guy Sansone and Laura Linynsky, the senior vice president at QCP will become interim CFO at HCR ManorCare.

The Toledo-based HCR ManorCare will need approval of the chapter 11 bankruptcy plan within 40 days while QCP will seek government regulatory approval, which may take three to six months, in order to operate a health care business.

HCR ManorCare runs 500 skilled-nursing and rehabilitation centers, assisted living facilities, hospice, and home health agencies. The skilled-nursing industry blames its many problems on low government reimbursement, declining occupancy, and high labor expense.

 “As part of the agreement, HCR ManorCare paid QCP $23.5 million in past-due rent. The companies' plan sponsor agreement stipulates that HCR ManorCare will continue to pay rent during the Chapter 11 period.” http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20180305/NEWS/180309949

According to health experts, HCR ManorCare treated 143,000 patients in 2017 and has experienced declining Medicare reimbursements due to the growing Medicare Advantage plans offered through private insurers.

The bankruptcy agreement promises to provide stability for employees, residents, and patients. However, the turnover of employees at one such HCR ManorCare facility in northern Virginia is constant as I have witnessed first-hand over the last four years.

Medicare has been stripped of more than $716 billion over a ten year period in order to fund Obamacare. This has affected seniors and their medical care, including their ability to keep their doctors or to find specialists. Some have decided to no longer accept new Medicare and Medicaid patients and keep only the well-established patients who were grandfathered into the private system they began to accept. https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2012/08/16/fact-checking-the-obama-campaigns-defense-of-its-716-billion-cut-to-medicare/#326c1c37385f

Nursing homes are financially strapped due to continuing underfunding. Mark Parkinson, CEO of the American Health Care Association, wrote, "In many areas of the country, nursing homes are paid for only a fraction of the care they provide. Our nation is at turning point where we must decide if we are going to continue to take care of America's seniors and individuals with disabilities." http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20180305/NEWS/180309949

This statement hits home for me. HCR ManorCare patients are cared for in one facility in northern Virginia where the atmosphere is somewhat strained, the staff is always short-handed, residents are not always cared for well, medications are denied because they are too expensive, doctors, nurses, and CNAs come and go without as much as a call to the families, patients fall all the time and break bones and hips as was the case for my mom for the last four years and most recently, UTIs are commonplace due to many reasons, one being lack of proper sanitation and slow diapering, not changing gloves between patients, not changing soiled sheets due to low CNAs to patient ratios, and lackadaisical cleaning of rooms.

HCR ManorCare is not the worst facility in the industry and not the best. There is a constant turnover of aides from African countries and new students come to learn on the job; there are employees and CNAs who really care about their patients and go above and beyond the call of duty; they tend to remain on the job long-term; and there are others who do not care at all for their patients.

It is a difficult and demanding job to care for human beings who are so sick that they can no longer fend for themselves and some are even helpless to feed themselves. Care givers must detach themselves from the pain and suffering and meet their patients’ needs. To make matters worse, some patients have dementia and are not cooperative with their CNAs.

Bureaucrats look at the business side of the operation. Due to financial reasons, social workers are often struggling to find transport for their handicapped patients to doctors and hospitals when families are physically unable to do so.

Occasionally nursing homes replace lost or stolen items, yet there is no plan in place for employees to watch for the dentures of the patients they care for. Consequently, dentures are constantly thrown away with the meal tray even though the nursing home must spend money to replace them.

Patients who no longer have families to insist that lost dentures be replaced, are left toothless and meals are chopped up for them every day. Mom’s nursing home lost four of her dentures, sometimes uppers, sometimes lowers. And it’s not just dentures and glasses that are lost, personal belongings are stolen constantly, and even food brought from the outside disappears.

I have watched new recruits who do not understand well or don’t care how disease spreads and the importance of sanitary conditions and gloved, gowned, and masked precautions for themselves and their patients.

Whether they are good or bad, nursing homes and other rehab facilities are a necessary “evil” that our society does not really understand well until they bother to visit their loved ones more than once a year or wind up themselves in one. Not everybody can afford to buy full-coverage private nursing home insurance in order to spend the last years of their lives in the posh five star private facilities, with care and dignity. But then, who is to say that they will be treated better?

You Too Will Be Old Someday

My beautiful Mom, 2016

Every time I go to the nursing home to see mom, I am reminded how self-absorbed and neglectful families have become in this country. For the last three years, on my weekly trips to see my mom, the patients, whose relatives never come by or only show up at Christmas to make sure they are still in the will, are sadly spinning their hours away in pain, loneliness, and suffering until the final moment when God calls them to Heaven.

Time is a precious commodity and people of all walks of life have become really selfish with their time. Senescence is an inconvenience in our western culture, not a source of wisdom and experience that we should seek and learn from. Many less developed cultures praise old age and respect the experience and knowledge gained from the long life of their elders. They don’t even have words in their language for nursing homes or assisted living, these are alien concepts. The tribe takes care of their sick and old.

The old men and women, who are now patients, were someone’s mom, dad, the soldier, the warrior, the teacher, the nurse, the home maker, the farmer, the mathematician, and the skilled builder who erected your home.  That someone seldom shows their face in the hallways to witness the pain, suffering, abuse, neglect, unsavory smells mixed with yells of help, to check on their loved ones, who were once strong, healthy, and full of life just like you.

We let poorly paid strangers from faraway lands feed mom and dad three meals a day of institutional food, bathe them, change their wet beds hopefully on time, their diapers, their outfits, wash and bleach their clothes to unrecognizable colors,  and give them medicine and proper care.

The nursing homes are always understaffed but it gets worse on weekends. As I limp in pain to see mom, I wished I could take her out of this place and have someone care for her in my home. But not every state pays for skilled nursing care at home. I can’t lift and do all the things for my mom that she needs, even though she has shrunk in size. No matter how many times I go visit her, or how hard I try to make her stay more home-like, it is never the same and I feel that I have failed her as a daughter and as a human being.

There are some patients who have outlived any immediate family or have never had any relatives to begin with. Nobody ever comes to see them. They are all alone in the world, sullen, and silent amid the cold and cruel world around them. Nobody notices them anymore and they seldom make eye contact.

I make a point to talk to some of them, touch them, bring a treat, and say hello. A twinkle of the former liveliness softens their furrowed faces, bringing out a short-lived smile. And a bit of sugar free chocolate sweetens the day, albeit it momentarily.

Catalina Grigore wrote recently about a 70-year old who died in a nursing home.  Having been Europeanized, Romania now has nursing homes, sad places where people go to die. The nurses did not like her, she seemed mean and uncommunicative. She left behind a pointed lesson in kindness that brought many to tears. https://voce.biz/info/2017/mar/23/aceasta-batrana-nu-era-suportata-de-nimeni-din-azilul-in-care-si-a-trait-batrinetea-ce-au-gasit-ingrijitoarele-dupa-ce-aceasta-a-murit/

You see an old lady, senile, with strange habits, a sad face, lost eyes who mentally contemplates times gone by, forced to do things she does not want to do, and stubborn. You think, she interferes with your daily routine, and that’s irritating, but you have no idea who she was or how she got there.

Inside she is the naughty child she used to be, skipping, jumping rope, and climbing trees in her grandma’s back yard; she is the beautiful twenty year-old who just graduated from college, in love, engaged, and soon to be married; she is the forty year-old with kids who are now adolescents; she is the fifty year-old crying into the pillow at night because her house is empty, the children’s laughter is gone, the nest is empty, and the life that revolved entirely around them is now gone; she is the sixty year-old who took care of and spoiled her grandbabies; and she does not know how she got to be seventy and then eighty, and so sick and lonely.

Everybody abandoned her – they either died or moved away and forgot her while living their busy lives.  Her husband passed away and she is frightened. She is now old, no longer the vibrant young woman who could move mountains. She is no longer a mom, a wife, a grandma, a sister, or an aunt. She is just a door number in the nursing home. Her name appears on a small plaque but the nursing staff calls her by her door number. It is much easier than trying to pronounce her foreign name.

Mother Nature is cruel – it robs us in the end of all that makes life worth living. Strength, health, youth, stamina, and joy of living abandon us.

In her moments of clarity, I asked my mom how she felt about her treatment in the nursing home. What she said brought me to tears.

“We are still young inside and healthy, dressed in our finest, ready to go shopping, to work, to a fine restaurant, dancing the night away at a party, loving and living.  But the nursing staff treats us with contempt because we are helpless. They argue with us to do their bidding. They want their shift to go smoothly and fast. Can you not see my soul and my crushed desires behind my shaking hands and my wrinkled face? I lost my children, my family, and everything I’ve ever loved; can you not be patient and kind with me? I don’t have much left in this world, just this old, aching, body who does not want to respond to movement. We are not ready to die and we certainly don’t want to die alone next to strangers.”

Just remember, if you live long enough, you too will be old someday, at the mercy of strangers, helpless, racked with pain, and arthritic.