Margaret Dempsey found herself in a bad place at a bad time of her life.
She was 82, had undergone several back surgeries as well as two hip operations and one on her right knee. Despite all these surgeries, and perhaps to a degree because of them, she was still in a lot of pain, pretty much all of the time. To make matters worse, her husband had a stroke and was in a nursing home.
Margaret, who could barely take care of herself, certainly was unable to tend to her husband’s needs and so she, somewhat reluctantly, resigned herself to being in the nursing home as well. At least it was the same one as her husband so she could see him every day. But that is where the bright spot ends. Because she had complete control of her mental faculties she could fully appreciate the dismal existence of living there. In fact, she told me that no one at the nursing home believed she had anything wrong with her, and they disliked her because their poor care of her didn’t go unnoticed.
Unfortunately, for most patients and their families, a nursing home is a necessary evil. Patients are generally too ill or weak to go home and families don’t have the facilities or the capabilities of taking care of their loved one in their home. And despite the fact that some nursing homes promote themselves as ‘rehabilitation centers’, it is a thinly veiled guise of their real nature…they are still nursing homes. (Which is kind of ironic, because they often times provide no nursing care whatsoever!)
In fact, it would seem that the lack of ‘nursing care’ the rule rather than the exception.
My wife’s father had Alzheimer’s disease and was confined to a nursing home for the latter part of his life. Were it not for my mother-in-law and my wife, he likely would not have lasted as long as he did. The stories they told me would cause even the meekest person to become irate… ‘But often you would have to bite your lip for fear that some of the nurses or aides would try to teach you a lesson by treating dad, even worse’.
‘They hate the squeaky wheel’, my wife and her mother used to say. Granted there were some good, almost saintly people who worked there; nurses that actually cared and took an interest in the well-being of the residents, making sure they were properly fed and clothed. But it seems, nursing homes attract many health care workers at the tail end of their careers that just got burned out taking care of critically ill patients, or perhaps in some cases were not successful keeping a job within mainstream medicine.
My wife would say, ‘You could always tell when certain nurses were on duty because when you would walk around the facility all the patients were practically comatose in their (wheel) chairs from being over medicated’.
Another time her father wound up with eight long scratch marks on his back from the nurse's aide with incredibly long finger nails which she dug into my father-in law’s skin as she picked him up. It really told a story about a person that was so irritated about having to lift up this poor disabled person from his bed that she could care less if she injured him or not. And she was supposed to be there to take care of him!
Of course this was not an everyday occurrence but what was, was the medication errors. The nurses would frequently dispense the wrong medication to my wife’s dad, almost as often as they would put his clothes on another patient, despite the fact the articles of clothing were clearly marked with his name.
And this was one of the better, more ‘affluent’ nursing homes. I can’t possibly imagine the depravity of care so many thousands of patients receive in poorer and less well equipped facilities. No wonder lawyers can make a living just suing nursing homes.
‘Many of the patients residing in nursing homes are unable to speak up for themselves’, my wife told me, because they have dementia from either advanced age or Alzheimer’s, and ‘unless they have family members that are there to speak for them they will not get the care they deserve’.
And it’s not just the nurses and aides that frequently neglect these patients, the physicians that staff these facilities are guilty as well, either not visiting at all or sending their assistants to tend to medical issues (if any are brought to their attention at all). If they do, it is usually because a family member has intervened on the patient’s behalf.
In fact, Margaret Dempsey told me that because she was unhappy with her physician she wished to switch to another. Finally, after much complaining, the nursing director and social worker gave her the names of several physicians. One of them refused to see her for some unknown reason and the other who said he would take her on as a patient has yet to see her nineteen days later, and counting.
Initially when I reviewed Margaret’s MRI films prior to seeing her I thought she might benefit from additional surgery but that was before I realized she was 82 years of age and had so many other medical problems. And when I sat down with her in my office I realized her biggest worry was that she would not be taken seriously about all the pain she had. I could even sense the extreme level of her anxiety by the way her facial expressions tightened as she talked.
And what distressed her even more was that Margaret understood because she did not have dementia she found herself to be one of those 'squeaky wheels'. Without any doubt, the nurses and the aides at the nursing home resented her for it, and any opportunity that they had to make her life difficult, they did just that.
Margaret Dempsey found herself very lonely indeed. And so all I did was sit down with her, and listen to her tell me about how badly they treated her at the nursing home, speaking up only occasionally and nodding my head in complete agreement, as I only too well understood her condition and situation. And by the end of our time together, helped by an occasional smile, her spirits seemed to be lifted a bit.
As I got up to leave, she asked me if I could write down on the doctors progress notes from the nursing home all of her problems, so they would now believe her. I turned and said, ‘Absolutely’. So, as I handed her the papers with my recitation of her symptoms, all of the operations she had undergone, my interpretation of her MRI scans and my medical conclusion that she had a very good reason to have continued pain, I said to her, ‘Here, you can keep this and show it to them whenever they tell you they don’t know what you are talking about’. She thanked me, took the paper as I sensed a small amount of peace that came across her face.
‘Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality
to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with
them; and those who are ill treated, since you are also in the body’
Hebrews 13:1-3
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