COVID Isolation is Killing My Mother-in-law in Assisted Living
If she lives she will never be the same again.
I am writing this from the confines of my 85-year-old mother-in-law’s assisted living facility as a team of movers packs up her apartment. Each item is carefully wrapped and loaded and her entire belongings fill a fourteen-foot box truck.
Looking back to March of 2020, my husband and I picked her up and carried her out to lunch for her favorite All-Star Waffle House meal. We knew lockdowns were eminent and before there were any reported COVID cases in Georgia, she wanted one last meal out.
She was completely ambulatory. She could ride in a passenger car, walk with her walker to and from the building, and stand up unassisted from a seated position. 6 days later, Atlanta went into lockdown.
In April, her physical therapy team suggested she order an electric wheelchair. Instead of working on her leg strength and balance, they taught her how to drive up and down the hallway.
A few weeks later, she was confined to her apartment because COVID had reached the staff and other residents in her building.
In the few weeks that she practiced wheelchair driving, she lost strength in her legs and was no longer able to rise unassisted. In another week or two of not leaving her room, she lost the ability to walk with a walker. Fast forward another 30 days and she needed 2–3 people to assist her in the bathroom. By her birthday in July, she had given up.
The low paid staff didn’t want to deal with it. They called her lazy when she said her legs were weak and she couldn’t stand. They refused at times to change her when she became completely incontinent. Assistants would kick the ball to the next shift.
They were mean to her, they quit answering her buzzer. They quit checking on her at night. She fell out of her chair once and her bed twice and slept on the floor till morning. One Saturday her aide told her if she didn’t get up and go to the bathroom, she’d have to sit in her mess all day and night. She wasn’t changed for the next 18 hours.
Not long after this, she fell in the shower because her aide told her she could shower on her own and walked away. She broke her wrist and was taken to the COVID burdened ER. Family members were not allowed.
With her arm and wrist in a cast, she could no longer slide herself in bed or in her chair. She became bedridden and quickly developed pneumonia and a urinary tract infection.
Back to the hospital for the next 17 days, where she almost died from raging infections. Thankfully, she recovered and was transferred to a rehab facility to regain her strength. But after 8 weeks of intense therapy, her therapists determined that she would never be able to stand or walk again.
If that wasn’t bad enough, she also began to have hallucinations and dementia.
According to the NIH, social isolation has been associated with higher levels of depression, hallucinations, cognitive decline, and a lower life expectancy. Elder abuse further compounds the problem.
We are heartbroken over these events. We spoke with her every 1–2 days and she always said everything was fine. We could tell she was a little down and discouraged because we couldn’t see her, but nothing to give us any serious alarm.
We live out of town and usually visit every 2–3 weeks. In those visits, I always reorganized her closet, refreshed her supplies, sorted all of her mail and paperwork, and of course visited with her. Being able to lay eyes on your loved ones in any kind of institutional facility is critical. With no family oversight, the staff had free rein to do or not do as they pleased.
We knew that her mobility had declined but we weren’t aware of the abuse. When we found out, we wanted to move her but where could she go? Some of these assisted living places and nursing homes were filled with COVID-positive residents. How could we check out a prospective facility if we weren’t allowed admittance?
Finally, we located a safer place last week. Next week when she is released from rehab, her new apartment will be set up and waiting for her. Waiting for another 14 days of solitary confinement. Unless she has a doctor's appointment in those 14 days in which case her quarantine will start over. Again.
She will be eligible for a COVID vaccine in the next few weeks and hopefully, they will ease the lockdowns at long-term care facilities. In the meantime, she is scared. She is confused. She is lonely. She is depressed. She is 100% dependent on other people to move her.
COVID has taken away her ability to walk and her zest for life and she has never once tested positive for the virus. Yes, we still have her. We still love her and she still loves us which is a lot more than thousands of other families can say.
We are grateful for the time we have left. But it is painfully sad to hear the sorrow in her voice and know we can’t hold her, touch her or look her deep in the eye and tell her that we have her back.
We have hired a lawyer to look into the elder abuse and filed a complaint with the state. It may be too late to help my mother-in-law, but perhaps it will help the next family. Please, do everything you can to stop this terrible virus so we can visit our elderly and vulnerable loved ones suffering in isolation.
This article from the CDC covers the symptoms of loneliness and social isolation and steps you can take to address it.
