What They Don’t Want You To Know
By: China Doll
C
onnie’s mother had been in and out of nursing homes for the past 13 years. When her mother had a bad experience with one nursing home, Connie would move her to another home thinking she would get different results. Her mother started having epileptic seizures as a young child, and she was diagnosed with dementia in 2009. In 2012, Connie moved her mother back home to Monroe, Louisiana from Dallas, Texas and tried to take care of her herself. It is hard enough for one person to live off a fixed income, but it is even harder to manage with two people. It was not easy to do alone, so in 2013 she did the only thing that she thought was best for her mother. She decided to put her back into a nursing home, Ouachita Healthcare and Rehab. She did not expect that facility to be perfect, but they should be held
accountable when their patients and residents are being mistreated. For example, when dirty clothes are not being washed, patient’s dishes are not being cleaned up, and the patient’s bed sheets are not being changed. There were several times where Connie’s mother was not being changed in a timely manner. On one occasion, Connie’s mother was wet to the point to where it had soaked through her clothes. Connie started complaining after she noticed that her mother’s clothes were piling up and not being taken to the laundry to be washed. But no matter how much she complained the problem never got resolved. She spoke to everyone from the administrator, Director of Nursing D.O.N, and even the Assistant Director of Nursing A. D.O.N. When that did not work, she reached out to the Ombudsman on duty to try to get the problem resolved. After that, meeting things seemed to get better and Connie decided to move back to Dallas. A short time later Connie decided to go visit her mother and while there, she found a coffee cup sitting on the bookshelf with molded coffee in it. She found dirty diapers mixed in with her mother’s dirty clothes, and she has even found a dirty diaper on the top of the bathroom sink. Connie’s mother was in a wheelchair and could not walk or get up without assistance, so she knew that her mother was not the one leaving the dirty diapers everywhere. Connie had threatened to go public with the way
her mother was being treated hoping that would spark a change and that her mother would be better taken care of. Well, in November of 2018 Connie went home to Monroe for the Thanksgiving holiday and took her mother out of the nursing home for a few days so they could spend Thanksgiving together. A week prior to that, Connie received a phone call from one of her mother’s nurses informing her that they noticed her mother had a bruise on her left leg. When Connie looked at her mother’s left leg and saw that it was covered with bruises, some of them new and some of them old. She asked the staff at the nursing home about the bruises, no one could give her a solid answer. She was given many excuses of why her mother’s leg had been covered in bruises. One excuse being that it was her blood thinning medication causing the bruises. After Connie complained about the hygiene of her mother and the bruises on her mother’s leg, a family member advised her to stop complaining so much before something even worse happened. Connie’s last resort was to move back to Monroe, take her mother out of that nursing home, and try to take care of her the best way she knew how. So, on December 17, 2018 she did just that. Shortly after on December 23 her mother had a seizure and had to be hospitalized. While in the hospital, the doctors caring for Connie’s mother wanted to know why she was on so much medication. They even questioned some of the medications that her mother was on. Her mother was over-medicated, and this caused her to sleep a lot due to the conflicting medications the nursing home had her taking. Connie’s mother stayed in the hospital for a total of 8 days in order to flush all the medications from her system. Connie worked in a nursing home for almost two years in Mesquite, Texas as a patient driver. She saw first-hand how some of the patients and residents were being treated. She said she’s learned a few thing over the years with her mother being in and out of nursing homes. She said if you have someone in a nursing home, you have the right to request a copy of the medication that they are taking. You should request that list at least once a month. Make sure that the medication list matches what they are telling you that they are taking. If you do not understand what the medications are and what they do please google them, call to speak to a pharmacist, or go in person to your local pharmacy to find out. Make sure that you go visit as often as you can, and never go visit at the same time each visit. Make sure one of the days you go visit falls on Continued on Page 21
Page 19
