Coronavirus prep

rheddmobile wrote: »

I heard from one of my high school friends today - we are planning on getting together online since we can’t meet up in person this year. He’s concerned about his mom who is in a nursing home which stopped accepting visitors to prevent exposure.

I made reassuring noises, but what bothers me about his mother’s situation is that I remember when my own dad was in a nursing home and the staff were completely untrustworthy. Once when I came for a visit I found my dad’s dinner tray sitting untouched on a table across the room from him - he wasn’t ambulatory and needed help with eating - they were just bringing in the tray and leaving it out of his reach, then taking it away again later so that he was actually starving. The “speech therapist” claimed she was “having great sessions” with him after he became completely non-verbal so I checked up on her, and her idea of a great session was sitting in silence reading a book to herself and then charging our insurance for a session. Since my dad had MRSA I asked for gloves to visit, and they didn’t know where the supply of gloves was. So yeah, it’s not like they were using them when changing IVs or fiddling with a picc line. Only by making sure someone visited every day at random times did he stay alive, and when I got a cold and couldn’t come for a week, not surprisingly he died. And the thing is, I talked to a friend who is an RN about what to do about the place, and did some research, and found - none of this was news, they were already under warnings for all kinds of violations - but they were the only place we could get my father into and we weren’t able to keep caring for him at home. And even if we had been able to pick a different home, pretty much every place else had a long list of the same kinds of violations, and according to my nurse friend it was standard practice to just sort of blow off care, since the staff felt that the residents were “circling the drain” anyway, why try?

So now, all across the US, these same staff members are in charge with no family members to keep tabs on them. They haven’t suddenly changed and become better people. They aren’t any better trained, or smarter, or more conscientious, they just know they don’t have to worry about what things look like when someone’s kid or spouse shows up. Some of them are the same staffs you have seen on the news in past years letting old people sit covered by filthy flood water after disasters, or not bothering to move them across the street to a hospital when their power went out and grandma’s ventilator stopped working. And now all across America they know no one is watching to make sure they do their jobs, plus, they are suddenly the front line who are supposed to be preventing the spread of deadly disease.