This is a long and boring story. Maybe just skim it and scroll to the end.


About twenty years ago, my mother had triple-bypass surgery. She was living alone at the time in a senior apartment complex and I lived about 15 miles away. She didn't have arrangements for people to check on her, make meals, bathe her, and so forth while she was recovering, so when they were ready to release her from the hospital, she was sent to a "nursing home". The only one her HMO contracted with that had a bed open was in a suburb about 15 miles north of me (in the other direction from her apartment). She was taken there by ambulance.

I arrived about the same time she did.

The place did not have a wheelchair with all of its parts, or one that could safely move her from the front door to her room. She had to hang on to the edges of the seat to keep from falling off.

The next thing I noticed was that there were boxes of supplies piled, seemingly randomly, in every hallway.

Oddly, nobody asked me to sign in or out. There seemed to be no record of who came or went or any attempt to find out if the people walking in the door belonged there.

When my mother got into her room, her roommate was a woman who was strapped down to the bed. The room was just outside the door to the Alzheimer's wing and apparently this woman was supposed to be in that wing, but they were out of beds. Every time someone came in the room, the woman asked if they had a pair of scissors (I guess to cut off the restraints). Aside from that, the woman randomly asked if Helen or Phyllis was going to be there soon. According to my mother, this went on day and night.

Every couple of hours, a woman on the staff came in and asked if anyone had left a dead horse in the room. My mother said "no" and the woman went away. Eventually, after several such visits, the woman found what she was looking for: TID hose (compression stockings to prevent blood clots in people who have had invasive surgery). My mother said she could not understand what the woman had been asking about. Her only response was "would you like me to get you a nurse with a different color skin?" (My mother was one of the least racist people I've ever known.)

After a day or two of this circus, my mother asked to be moved to a different room.

Be careful what you ask for.

Her new roommate had some sort of breathing machine. It was a box about knee height on casters on the floor next to the bed. It made an audible gurgly hum. Every time a member of the staff came into the room, they kicked the machine so it was up against the metal bed frame. This amplified the hum to the point you could not carry on a conversation at normal volume. In fact, having spent a lot of time in factories, if that was a regular work environment, OSHA would have required hearing protection.

Across the hall was a fellow who had severe PTSD. Every couple of minutes, randomly, he would let out a shriek at the top of his lungs. You could hear this several rooms away. It also went on night and day.

The other thing my mother said was that nearly all of the staff were diminutive Asian women and the only way any of them could get her sitting upright was to grab her arms and YANK as hard as they could. Remember, my mother had just had triple-bypass surgery and was freshly sewn back together inside and out. The only member of the staff who could gently lift her upright was a six foot four guy from Russia who had been a doctor there, but since his license didn't translate, he was working as a nurse in the US.

I won't go into the food or the completely haphazard meals. Nor the recreational and social activities. And certainly not the general cleanliness of the place (it was pretty bad).

After three or four days of this, my mother started to develop symptoms of a respiratory infection. After a day of doing nothing, the best the facility could do was to call a mobile x-ray service. They had to wheel her out into the parking lot (in April... in Seattle) for a chest x-ray and they said it showed nothing. She was getting worse. Much worse. They were talking about sending her back to the hospital.

My mother said she just wanted to go home. I told the guy in charge of the place that I was taking her home. He started telling me that I couldn't do that, I couldn't do that without authorization from her HMO, it was "against medical advice", etc. I told him letting her stay there another minute was "against medical advice". He insisted that she was getting competent care by qualified professionals. I told him to get lost.

I went to the front desk and told them I was taking her home. They seemed to care not at all. Who? What room? I pulled my car around to the side door and got her out and into the car.

The director of the facility was in his office having a meeting -- it looked to be with people who were not his staff. I walked in, looked at him and said, "I sincerely hope that one day YOU have open heart surgery and have to recover in your own facility." I walked out, and drove my mother to her apartment.

Before we even got there, her symptoms disappeared. She was alert, chipper, and feeling infinitely better. Within a day, she was up and around. I stayed overnight two nights and checked on her at least daily until she could fend for herself.

I am sure that if I had left her in that horrible, horrible facility she would have been dead within a few days, or they would have just sent her back to the hospital.

I will say that this was one of the very few experiences I have had with "nursing homes". I have no idea if this is representative of all of them or an outlier. My mother's HMO had previously owned its own nursing home and my father passed away in the hospice wing of that one. That was a very very good experience and the place really did seem to be staffed with competent, well-qualified, caring professionals who had all of the equipment and resources they needed to do their jobs. This place my mother survived was just plain horrible.

Half way through this ordeal, I contacted the woman at the HMO who was responsible for the contract. I sent her a letter detailing all of the above and more. She said that she cried when she read it. A couple weeks later she contacted me "off the record" and said she had cancelled the contract. It was that bad.


So, what prompted me to remember all this and bother recounting all of the sad details now? There is only one such facility in the north end of Kirkland, Washington. The name has changed since my mother was there. I wonder if anything else has.

Ugh, I knew when I started reading that that’s where you were going. Wow.

I’m glad you were able to get your mother out of there! What a nightmare it must have been for you both.

That's pretty grim. I'm sorry that she and you went through that.



There are some very good nursing homes with wonderful people who provide excellent care. I don't know how I would have made it through the last three years of my mom's life without them. I owe them a debt I can never repay.

So sorry, and it sounds like it’s still a pretty sorry place. Ugh.

But I think you know bedlam when you see it. This place was bedlam. So, if it's anything today like it was then, I can only imagine that any contagion would plow through there unabated.

Thanks for the wishes. This is ancient history in my life and my mother passed away about ten years ago.

But the frustration and the disgust with that facility remains a memory.

Wow.

Glad you got her out.
How many nursing homes are like that?
A friend who worked in one told me I was fortunate to have bad hearing. She said it would be a blessing if I ended up in a nursing home.

Yea, I saw Pat being interviewed yesterday. She said that after she told the woman calling her that her mother had died that morning, the woman just paused and said "oh my god, it's not on the chart".

While the care that my mom got was very good, I could also see that the facility she was in is having to juggle all of the challenges being thrown their way. Trimming staff and trying to economize may work OK for normal situations, but when a crisis occurs, things can go south pretty fast.

Maybe I'll start a separate thread one of these days for discussion....

PJ, that's a truly horrific story. I'm so sorry you and your mother went through all that (and all the other patients and their families).

It certainly is especially scary for any of us who can picture ending up in a nursing home, by which I mean one that caters to any but the very affluent.

And many kudos for handling it as brilliantly as you did. I cheered inwardly when I read you had managed to get their license cancelled!

And now 14 people have died at that facility.

Details on what's going on at Life Care

https://www.bellevuereporter.c...ay-press-conference/

16 deaths “connected with” the facility.