Why I Despise Nursing Homes

smahala1991
Why I despise nursing homes

My grandmother was in a nursing home as a result of a fall that paralyzed her from December 2012 till June 2013 her death. She was supposed to be there less than that and be returned to her home after 90 days. In that time I learned to not like nursing home. In fact I despise them so much now that I will never step inside one ever again.


1. They blatantly lie


All I ever heard from them was lies. The first thing they lied about was her length of stay. She was supposed to stay at least 90 days until she could have learned to walk again and use fine motor skills. They barely ever worked with her fine motor skills. They hardly ever got her up walking either. So as a result she was admitted long term.



Second of all: they promised her that she was going to get approved for home health care by medicaid. My grandmother hated being there in the nursing home and I hated it for her. So the staff brought up the idea to set her up for home healthcare. I thought it was going to be an immediate process, but turned out it was taking weeks and months to hear anything back from them. I started to begin to question if they really were going to order it at all, or were they milking the money from Medicaid and medicare?



The third lie was the worst one that I cannot forgive them for. They called saying nothing was wrong but they wanted to bring in hospice to give her extra care. Now I'm not a medical expert, but It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that Hospice is the last resort. In other words they knew her death was coming. They also asked if it was ok to put her on a feeding tube since she wasn't eating. We all said a resounding no to that.



Why I Despise Nursing Homes


When the day for her hospice evaluation came, the coordinator came in and met with us. The hospice nurse came in later that day. The Hospice nurse pulled us all aside and said that she was actually in the first stages of dying. She even asked why the nursing home didn't even tell us she was dying. I really felt betrayed that the nursing home lied to us about that instead of just coming out and saying she wasn't going to be around much longer.


2. They made her health actually worse


While she was in the nursing home she also had stage two Lymphoma. So she was taking Chemotherapy treatments, or so she was supposed to have been. One of her doctors was actually accusing the nursing home of skipping her doctors appointments and treatments. Because they were responsible for her transport to and from the center. If you skip cancer treatment most of the time you have to restart the whole treatment all over again.



While in the nursing home she also got very delirious. She kept having thoughts that the nursing home staff was poisoning her food, someone was coming after me and my grandpa, that Someone was pretending to be her to claim some money that she was apparently promised from a lawsuit that never even happened, to even saying that I did a crime I never even done which was kick one of the nurses which she claimed I was arrested for. The nurses knew that never even happened and even assured it never did. Even me and my grandpa even knew that I didn't even do that because believe me if I was ever arrested I would have remembered surely.



She also was constantly sick every time she was in the nursing home. One time she almost died from Pneumonia while at the nursing home. They took her to the hospital and kept her there for a.couple weeks. She was on a ventilator for several days and could not communicate very well. She also got bronchitis one other time while there and was taken to the emergency room. She was returned back to the center that same night.



Why I Despise Nursing Homes
A couple months later, about two weeks before she died, the nursing home doctor told us that she was going to be admitted to the hospital due to blackened stools. They kept her in the hospital for a week doing endoscopies, colonoscopy, and even cat scans to find out the problem where it was coming from. There was internal bleeding but they could not find where from (which was probably the cancer spreading). After she returned from the hospital her health went down for that last week. The telephone calls never came, she wasn't eating right, and she wasn't talking. So when we met with hospice that Saturday they told us her life was coming to an end and we had about another week at best. So we visited her Saturday and Sunday. That Monday morning about 2:30 am she passed away. The nursing home was no longer her prison, her hell on earth, she was finally free.



Of course I had a lot of anger and still do towards the nursing home. I feel like they cheated us. They were using her medicaid to keep her in there instead of getting her in home health care like she wanted. I feel like they could have done a lot more to make sure she was doing well instead of watching her health go down by the day. To this day I still will not step into a nursing home even though my sister works in one as a dietary aide. When I pick her up I always wait in the car until she gets out even though there is a lobby where it is air conditioned. That I guess is just the anger and frustration I had built up from unanswered questions. It could have been the cancer that did the damage, but I still feel the nursing home could have done more to make sure she was ok.

Why I Despise Nursing Homes
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