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  • Nursing Home Contradictions
  • Rosalind Feldman (bio)

I treat your mother like my grandmother," the nursing assistant said. Mother was fortunate in having the same people provide most of her care during the last two and a half years of her life. She was unfortunate in having had other people who were not as interested in her needs also provide care.

I placed my ninety-year-old mother in a nursing home when, despite the twenty-four-hour assistance of home health aids, I could not continue to safely provide the care she needed at home. But before she became disabled I had been familiar with nursing homes from teaching beginning nursing students basic skills. An image from that time of a mute woman with white hair, propped up by pillows in bed with an untouched breakfast tray in front of her and a large, purplish-black contusion circling her eye occasionally disturbed my thinking. When I had asked the charge nurse what happened, she had replied, "Rolled out of bed."

During the five years prior to my mother's final nursing home stay, she had been in nursing homes twice. Her first stay lasted thirty days while she recovered from a hip fracture. During her first hour on the rehabilitation unit, a nursing assistant began positioning my mother in bed by placing her arms above her head and pulling her up by her hands until I told him to stop. By the end of the thirty days, my parents had paid more than twenty-five thousand dollars for private, round-the-clock care; the social worker mandated this care as a condition for Mother's stay due to her dementia. It seemed wise, since another patient recovering from a broken tibia broke her arm by falling out of bed on her first day there. Cries of "Help me, help me!" came regularly from patients stranded on toilets. One day, arriving after work, I was unable to open the door to Mother's room. A gerichair was propped behind it on the inside. Mother was unperturbed, sitting inside the room in a wheelchair. I managed to push the geri-chair aside, enter, and wheel Mom out to the hallway area that the home used as a dayroom. While we were sitting there, the nursing assistant I'd hired to provide private care walked right past us carrying packages from a local department store. I asked the charge nurse how my mother could have been left in such a situation. She responded that the floor nurses had no responsibility for my mother because she had a private nursing assistant. Needless to say, bringing my mother home was a relief.

My mother's second nursing home experience occurred after my father had died. I selected a nursing home for her based both on my experience as a consultant in another home belonging to the same owners and on a friend's recommendation. Mother seemed oblivious to entering the home.

During one visit to my mother in the second home, I heard someone crying, "Help me!" Following the cry to a room adjacent to the nurses' station, I discovered a woman strapped into a wheelchair with restraints on her wrists and feet, sitting alone facing a wall through an open door. "Why is she like this?" I asked the charge nurse.

"For her protection," she replied.

Disgusted, I drove home and called in a complaint to the state division of nursing homes the following day. I then arranged to withdraw my mother from the home. When I arrived, she was not in her room. I found her in a wheelchair in a large room where two unconscious patients were receiving intravenous fluids. Mother was pulling on one patient's tubing. I removed her hands from the tubing and wheeled her to the nurses' station, where I told them what had happened. Once I'd brought her home, a huge bill incongruent with the goods and services my mother had received soon arrived. I studied the items on the bill, particularly the pharmaceuticals and equipment, and rebutted each inauthentic charge. The bill was reduced by a significant sum.

After that, I kept my mother in...

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