So, once again I got everything ready to move Daddy. The room Daddy was to have at St. Francis was getting new laminate flooring and they were going to paint and upgrade the fixtures. But, right off the bat, the day we were moving him in, there were outlets with loose hanging wires, the flooring wasn't even completely finished, the patio door didn't lock, the screen was hanging off, there were 3 cable outlets (one worked) and the shower head...dear god, that shower head was so disgusting and covered with god knows what...I took it off and marched it downstairs to the Administrator myself. She acted a little put out but agreed that it needed to be replaced, that they had extra and one of the workmen doing renovations would bring me one right away. HOURS later, we returned after taking my Dad to eat, and I noticed the "new" shower head. It had what appeared to be spackle, dirt and caulking all over it. Whatever it was wouldn't scrape off, I tried. I removed the shower head and took it back to Betty, the Administrator. Again, she was "put out", but said that the owner had just come in and he would just go get one at the store. Um, yeah, ya think? I also said that I expected the loose wires and everything else to be fixed. Apparently I am QUITE the Primadonna.
So we finally got Dad all moved in to St. Francis. His room was a good size, and he just had the one larger room and a bathroom this time. We thought that may help him not misplace everything. He was excited about the fact that the facility had a large outdoor grounds area, so he had plenty of room to walk himself senseless...it had an automatic fence for the cars to come in...they called it a "wanderguard" to keep the wandering alzheimer/dementia residents from escaping. Despite the initial problems with the lousy shower head and wires, etc., I was trying to stay positive that things would get better.
Within a few weeks, The Chair Man was back from vacation. Again, the caregivers and residents were having orgies. Dad said he was being cussed out daily by the caregivers. He said they'd tell him he couldn't leave his room. He said they'd yell at him. He said that people were talking to him through the TV and Nurse's Intercom.
But then "actual" things started happening...and I began questioning the previous incidents that appeared to be hallucinations. Daddy knew that at night, he took 5 pills. He'd call me and say he'd only gotten 3, so I called to make sure. Turns out they DID let his meds run out and "forgot" to reorder. A few times they didn't feed him...either didn't remind him to come eat or didn't wake him when he slept through breakfast AND lunch. Of course I complained because CLEARLY my standards are far too high, right? This is how I was treated...that I was overreacting. Clearly no one else really expects their loved ones to be fed or given their meds.
One afternoon, Dad said that Betty and Michelle, the Administrators, had "taken off". For whatever reason, this "delusion" struck me as extra-odd, and I decided to call the front office to ask if they were there. I did have a few things to ask them about...like the fact that no one ever painted or finished the floor or fixed the sliding glass door...it still didn't lock and the screen fell off daily. Betty and Michelle weren't there. Some new Med. Tech. said they'd left the day before without notice...left no notes about some of the resident's care, where keys were, nothing. Just took off.
A new Administrator came on board that week...and the way I found out about and met this Administrator, Gina, is quite a tale in itself.
One afternoon I had gotten home from errands. I was listening to my messages, and as usual, there were about 7 messages from my Dad. He was having serious hallucinations this day, so I was hitting delete without listening to them. I'd found that Daddy would have forgotten all about his daily traumas, but I didn't, and it disturbed me, so I deleted everything and just called him instead, knowing that he wouldn't even know what he said on my machine. So, there I am, I'm hitting delete over and over and just happen to push away from my desk while the final message continued to play...
I froze.
Inbetween my Dad saying it was really, really, really, reallllllllly important that he talk to me, there was a noise, a voice. I literally got goose bumps. I replayed the message at least 6 times. To be honest, my first thought was to question if my Dad had been right all along...what if all these people he saw were REAL...that they were ghosts or spirits...and that my machine had freakin' caught one talking to him?! But after each time I listened to it, literally pressing my ear up to the speaker with the volume up as loud as possible, I realized what it was. My Dad was talking, then there was a beep (the alert that someone is about to talk to you on the Nurse's Intercom), then a woman's voice was saying things like, "I'm the man in your chair! Look at your chair!"
My Dad was interacting with the voice, asking the voice where they were, to which they would answer, "Look at your chair! I'm in your chair! Look! It's bumping up and down!" He said, "Where? I don't see you!" and the woman just kept antagonizing him.
To say I was floored, my god...my adrenaline was pumping like never before. The anger building up inside me made me realize I am capable of murder. If the person who did this was in front of me at this time, they would have died a horrible death, or would have at least spent months in the hospital.
I phoned St. Francis, and this "Gina" answered. To say our introduction was less than stellar would be kind. I was mean. I was loud. I had no idea who she was and I was loudly explaining what I had just "accidentally" come across on my answering machine. She seemed horrified, so I calmed down a bit. She told me it was her third day as the new Administrator, and I tried to play the message for her over the phone. I ended up in the car within minutes and she called a meeting with the 3 caregivers on duty at that time. I was not nice. I was not calm. We called my machine from Gina's office and put it on speakerphone for them to hear. They all denied it, despite the fact that minutes before I got there, one of the caregivers admitted she knew what happened, but that, of course, she didn't do it.
I called the Police, the Ombudsman, and every reporting agency that dealt with Elder Care or abuse. The Police Officer initially took the report and recorded the message, but he would never return my calls after that. Not once. The local Ombusdman, to this day that I know of, did nothing. No charges went through. The caregivers weren't even fired. They ended up leaving on their own because I was there ALL the time now, many times a day at odd hours, watching them. And Gina was watching them. Clearly they didn't like working anywhere they were held accountable. Good riddance.
I felt impossibly horrible after this. What ELSE had happened that we didn't know about? Were any of his other hallucinations true? He had flat out TOLD me that someone had been talking to him through the Nurses Intercom. He TOLD ME...and I didn't believe him.
The owner, Baleir Dhillon, called me after this incident. He seemed genuinely apologetic, and he and and Gina promised that nothing like this would ever happen again, and they asked if I could please give them a chance to prove that. Knowing I was up against a wall to find another facility ASAP, I let him stay to see how it went. Surely it had to get better now, right? They would be on their toes and be ridding themselves of all the irresponsible, sarcastic, annoying caregivers, right?
Screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeech!
That is just the sound of Satan's front door opening a little wider, so they get a good look at you while you walk through.
So. Over the next two or so months at St. Francis, his meds ran out at least 4 more times. Meds that he had to take every day...for diabetes, cholesterol, depression, anti-psychotics...some of these meds are such that, if missed, the effect/benefit can just stop. Or, you can have serious complications, side effects or withdrawals. More times than I can possibly count, he wasn't fed. I kept dozens of receipts for meals I had to go buy him when he'd call me crying that he was hungry...or I'd just pick him up and bring him to my house, or bring him food that I had cooked if he wasn't feeling well enough to get up. My Dad was saying that caregivers were being mean to him and that when he would respond, they would say, "What are gonna do, huh? go get your daughter to come teach us all a lesson like she did last time?", and that they would laugh. I brought everything I saw or heard to Gina's attention. She said she was doing everything she could do, but that she couldn't just fire everyone since it was really difficult to find any help at all.
I started believing almost everything he told me and questioned everything.
Other residents, because they saw me there constantly, started asking me if I could help them fix something for them too, and I also began bringing baked goods from home for people. I fixed door knobs, put batteries in smoke detectors that beeped for days or weeks...this place was a HOLE. My Dad's complaints got so bad that I started coming to the facility at odd hours. One time I came at nearly midnight, hopped the fence and came in through the back entrance so no one would see me drive in the gate. There were no employees anywhere. I went from room to room on both floors. Either the rooms were dark with the door closed or doors were open with no one in them or residents sleeping. I checked all the bathrooms, the usual smoking spot for the lazy caregivers...there was NO ONE working. NO ONE.
During this same time, right before Christmas, we had finally found a buyer for Nany's house. Oh, yes, all this time it had STILL been for sale...all this time, dealing with all this other crap, I was trying to sell a house two states away. I went through two real estate agents, bastard cousins going into the house and helping themselves to appliances, the roof leaking, the water heater exploding, water damaging walls and flooring that had to be replaced, finding out that the "someone" had filed a false claim on the roof AND had been mailed a check for thousands of dollars...oh and there's SO much more, but basically...everything that could go wrong DID. So, 11 1/2 months after Nany died, her house finally sold...and Daddy would get that money...so he had a little bit more to work with as far as finding a facility, but it still burned my butt knowing that there had been another $200,000 out there that could make his care situation/life so much easier. But life goes on.
So Christmas and New Years came and went with what became just usual behavior: drunk people in and out of St. Satan's. I tried to ignore it, knowing that he'd be out of there soon, and I was so freakin' happy about finally selling Nany's house, I really, REALLY tried to focus on the good. It's not as if ANY of the so-called agencies that exist to help elder abuse or neglect were doing a damn bit of anything about this situation anyway. NO phone calls were ever returned, even after the harassment over the nurses intercom. This system is a fucking joke. Unless someone DIES, they do nothing...and even then, it's not enough. Unless a relative is accused of stealing MONEY, nothing is done. All the poor, mentally and physically abused and neglected elderly residents sitting in their own filth, barely being fed, not being given their medications, being left in a hallway to rot in a wheelchair...they are expendable. They mean nothing. These agencies know that there is a never-ending supply of these people and that eventually they'll get around to helping "someone", but not until they feel like it. We were on our own, and I knew it.
I brought my Dad back to St. Francis on X-Mas after he spent the day with us. ALL over the front lawn were alcohol bottles. Two trashy looking men sitting in some 70's looking Trans-Am type of car were sitting in the car inside the PRIVATE parking lot. They got out of the car when they thought I was inside, but I watched them from the window since I was ALWAYS there and I had NEVER seen these guys before. They staggered out of the car and left their bottles on the ground next to the car. I told the first caregiver I saw, Tracy, who was really the only one who ever did any work or seemed concerned about anything or anyone about the men, and she was very upset. She then found the other caregiver on duty, who basically said she knew that these men were family members of a resident there...she wasn't at all concerned that they were rip-roaring drunk. Tracy just walked away when the other caregiver didn't share her concern. So I called the Police and gave them a description of the men and the car...right before they drunkenly drove off. I have no idea what ever came of that...when I told Gina about it, she acted like this was just another one of my "ridiculous" complaints.
New Year's day I came early to visit Dad, about 8 AM, and ALL over the front lawn were about a dozen beer cans. Litter was everywhere. I can only assume that the caregivers on duty the night before had their own little celebration. Nothing ever came of any of this either.
At this point, I was asking Gina every few days that I wanted the owner to call me. He didn't. For about a month and a half, I asked that he call me. Nothing.
In the meantime, we found out that a private room was about to be available back at the Stratford. I was ecstatic at the thought. Besides the fact that my Dad was constantly upset about having the roommate who ended up passing away the last time, the Stratford had been amazing. We had about a week until move in and I could NOT wait.
The last (prorated) month of rent had been due at St. SATAN'S, and for whatever reason, be it fate or complete coincidence, the check I had given to one of the caregivers to give to Gina never found its way to her hands (never was cashed either). She called me during that last week and asked if I had paid it or...?...since I was never late with a payment before. I told her I had given the check to a caregiver weeks prior...but after I got off the phone, I thought about it...and then told Gina that I had canceled the last check and would write a new one when the owner decided to call me. Gina said that wasn't fair. IIIIIII said "what wasn't fair" was all the harassment my Dad endured, the meds not given to him, the FOOD not being fed to him. She said nothing to that.
And...wouldn't ya know it...after nearly TWO months of basically being a pest with my requests for a call from the owner and no response...when I said I wouldn't pay the rent...he called me within 3o minutes!!!!!
We had a very heated conversation about all the things that occurred during my Dad's stay. All this idiot could say was that he had "put $400,000 into his facility"....and there is NO freakin' WAY that place had that amount of money put ANYWHERE unless they had buried it in the yard. When I continually pointed out all the things caregivers had done and said and how he was SO completely absent and neglectful as the owner of a facility that should be EXCEEDING the State's far too low standards...he had the nerve to tell me that I was RUDE and had NO idea what kinds of 'personal problems he was dealing with at that time'...that I had NO right to assume ANYTHING about 'his person' and that he was NOT absent or neglectful and that though we had been through some hard times at his facility, he had APOLOGIZED for that and I should just pay the rent and be done".
AHEM! (that was me clearing my throat for the severe tongue lashing that was to come)
To sum up, I basically told the worthless piece of crap that he was a slumlord and that he was not only NOT going to receive the final rent, but that he should consider JUST how lucky he is that I had not filed a LAWSUIT against him, AND held him responsible for all the meals and expenses we paid when we had to rush order my Dad's meds or for all the meals his incompetent idjits didn't give my father.
He said that I should come visit his facility again in a few months and he would "prove me wrong"...that I would SEE what a fabulous place he'd have THEN.
But apparently he agreed with me, 'cause I never heard a word about paying them again!
All I know about that facility as of now is that a woman from my support group placed her husband there after I pulled my Dad out and 5 days later he was DEAD.
I hope the place burns with the owner and caregivers inside.
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