Nursing home residents stage heartbreaking protest outside facility: 'Rather die from COVID than loneliness'

[Cathoholic]

RidgeSprinter to Cathoholic . . . .

Cathoholic, where will you be when you are very old and feeble?

This thread is not about me.

 

[Cathoholic]

Or are you suggesting a new ministry (of nursing home visitors)?

RidgeSprinter’s response?

There should be. For all intentional purposes, those in the Nursing Homes are prisoners without the strict visitor requirement you find in actual prisons, but prisoners nonetheless.

Some nursing home inhabitants are actually strapped in to their chairs during the day staring out a window or watching a TV. It is quite a depressing sight. It takes a special individual to visit the inhabitants on a weekly basis.

Great response here RidgeSprinter! Nice work.

 

[RidgeSprinter]

Oh on the contrary, it is about all of us eventually.

It all depends where one ends up when we can no longer take care of our self.

 

[Wendy1989]

I don’t blame those residents one iota! My father-in-law lives in the Dallas metro area and is in a senior active living complex. From mid-March until he moved out Labor Day weekend, he was only allowed to leave his apartment for 15 minutes a day. He could leave the facility ONLY to go to the doctor or dentist. If a resident left the building, the resident had to go into a 14 day quarantine. While there are some folks that needed some assistance with daily activities, most were active and doing things in the community. My FIL had just given up his vehicle last November because he just didn’t want to pay the high insurance premiums. These people were not allowed any visitors of any kind, even in a physically distant form. The only people they saw were the staff and any incidental residents while out for their 15 minutes. My FIL said he felt like Papillon! My brother-in-law lives in the area and repeatedly offered for his dad to move in with him; which was declined. The corporation was bragging that they had the lowest COVID rate of any senior facilities in the country.

My FIL moved to a new facility that had a smaller apartment but he could go and buy his own groceries, get his hair cut, etc… and he only had to do an initial 3 day quarantine and everybody wears masks in the common areas. This facility has a rather low COVID rate as well and treats seniors with dignity.

People in a mentally depressed state have lower disease resistance. We humans need face to face interaction with other humans, especially our families to survive. This whole mess reminds me of the quote “The surgery was a success. The patient died”.

 

[Cathoholic]

RidgeSprinter . . .

it is about all of us eventually.

I get what you are saying . (I am just trying not to personalize any threads. No matter who it concerns.)

 

[Cathoholic]

Nice post Wendy1989.

This whole mess reminds me of the quote “The surgery was a success. The patient died”.

Yep. A Pyrrhic Victory
when benefits AND risks BOTH
are not considered.

 

[ProVobis]

And all Nursing Homes have that peculiar smell.

I don’t know why that is. That could be deadly too.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

Gotta tip my hat to these oldsters. They have a lot more courage and rational balance than a lot of young, healthy people I know.

They also don’t have very much to lose at this point in their existence, compared to the parent in their 30s, 40s or 50s who is supporting a family, which may also include a lot of the staff taking care of them.

The nursing home where the protests occurred were already providing for family visitation, and doing everything reasonable to prevent infection, which includes keeping a distance between visitors and residence.

Most nursing homes of which I’m aware are doing this. I have friends who have people in them and I myself have a 90+ year old in one since last year. Her facility got hit with something like 30+ COVID cases earlier in the year and some people died. Through the grace of God she didn’t catch it.

 

[Ridgerunner]

They also don’t have very much to lose at this point in their existence

Only their lives.

compared to the parent in their 30s, 40s or 50s who is supporting a family, which may also include a lot of the staff taking care of them.

And almost none of whom would be in mortal danger from the disease themselves.

 

[Nononony]

I personally feel that, if I were a nursing home resident, I would far prefer to risk getting a virus and dying if it meant I could have precious moments of joy with the only truly valuable thing I had left in life… my loved ones… and if I were in a situation where I lived with a group of people who were in the same boat (end of life, death is near, can’t do most things on my own anymore… you know, the stereotypical aspects of life in a nursing home…) I would want them to be able to experience the same joy, regardless of the risk to my personal health, because we’re all on our way out! I don’t feel out of line in this thinking as it is what is reported to me by every elderly person I know. (Perhaps we just have like minds…)

The argument that they can move out if they don’t like it seems silly, because if they were still able to maintain that sort of personal autonomy they wouldn’t be living in a nursing home.

I recently met a pharmacist who owns their own pharmacy. They openly lamented the amount of income they lost when covid took the lives of 13 of their local nursing home residents and then the authorities shuttered the home for deep cleaning. I understand this is a difficult circumstance for the business owner, but it made me wonder if, on some universal level, “we” aren’t “protecting” our weakest population in the name of someone else’s financial benefit. I know that’s an ugly suggestion, but so is keeping people from the elements of life that are necessary for survival and then calling them “selfish” when they cry out for help. Ugly things are ugly.

It’s a complicated issue.