Once ensconced there, originally admitted because of my father's inability to provide care and then to diagnose and treat her incontinence issues, the staff in charge quickly proceeded from suggesting, to advocating, to enforcing placement of my mother in an institution.
They did everything they could to ensure this would happen. They chose to ignore their concerns about his mental competency, given his erratic behaviour when visiting. They chose to ignore that he has never fully recovered from a decompensating seizure that he had while visiting my mother on July 17, 2014, going so far as to consult and meet with him on the disposition of his wife while he was still a patient, too. Can anyone say ironic?
In Manitoba, the law requires that even when my father trotted out his vaunted Power of Attorney document that my mother had granted him (under duress: and that is a whole 'nother tale for another time) in 2010, that my mother be assessed by 2 physicians (not nurses) who agreed independently that she was mentally incompetent (this still has not happened) and therefore subject to the decisions others, like a P.O.A., might make for her. Then again, the genius of the ladies who were trying to force my mom into an institution was such that they kept referring to nebulous spousal privileges that my father had in their eyes, ones that ignore the Charter and would even reverse the Persons Decision and make women mere objects to be tossed aside by their husbands at will.
As more proof of their malfeasance, after first claiming that my mother had been assessed by a doctor on SOGH staff, they then reversed their story and said she had been assessed by one nurse. Her doctor of record at SOGH had never entered any such examination; record of it only appeared weeks after the nurse administrator for my mother's ward claimed it existed (but she could not find it in my mother's chart or binder). On my mother's behalf, I requested that her neurologist of record, Dr. David Eggertson, the only physician who has ever yet conducted a review of my mother's mental competency, come to do a new assessment. He was willing to do this but was turned away by the hospital with the excuse that it would not be professional of him to be involved since it had been 3 years since he had seen my mother (because my father had been neglecting to make or keep appointments made, despite their importance in her health care planning) and since they had not requested him.
Subsequently, they came up with a genius new category in law: "mentally incompetent for discharge planning." In this newly created scheme, there was no room for anything such as adults disagreeing. If you didn't agree with them, see the world as they did, didn't express your wishes within their allowed limits, why then of course you were mentally incompetent. So the mere fact that my mother still would prefer that my father change his mind and allow me to take care of both of them in some kind of home-like setting (even though she knows in her heart of hearts that is not an option because of him), the mere fact that that is what she would most like 'proves' she is mentally incompetent. In my discussions with an investigative member of the Office of the Public Trustee and Guardian, this new category of incompetence was labelled "complete nonsense" and "not law", the officer adding that she would be glad to disabuse the hospital of this delusion if she were appointed to the case.
Meanwhile, back at the castle, patients in my mother's room started to inform me of the gossip that the staff were engaging in, all negative about me, even proceeding so far as to tell patients not to talk with me and disciplining one lady who repeated for me in fair detail a particularly nasty interaction the Social Worker of record had with my mother, wherein she traumatised my mother, a patient in recovery in their care (she was still shaking when I visited in the evening) telling my mother her two choices were to stay in the hospital or to go home alone (which, of course, was not true, as I could have cared for Mom at home as they all well knew). My 'spy' (so she reported she was called by one staffer over this incident) was told it was against WRHA policy for her (!) to have repeated what she heard their staff say (not about my mother, who as a patient has such privacy expectations, but about me as a family member!); staff then relocated this quite ill lady to another room. I only learned about any of this because, as a person of conscience, despite her own health concerns, she had me tracked down so that I could meet with her briefly to hear from her directly what had been said.
Other patients, including one Mr. Pollack, who was a very sharp individual with little respect for the nurse administrator or how the ward was being run, informed me of each time they subjected my mother to one of their little meetings in my absence, which they constantly contrived. The words that he used wryly still come to mind: "charade" and "farce".
Although the nurse administrator, her social worker henchwoman and eventually the patient relations officer they inducted into their machination (who had no medical training!) demonstrated absolute ignorance in communicating with a fluid or expressive aphasic patient like my mother (let alone any sensitivity or finesse), they continued to harass here even when she tried to end discussions by saying clearly enough so that other patients could hear and understand her repeating: "Go away!"
They deliberately overlooked easily accessible standard guidelines we had been taught by my mother's speech language therapist, Ms. Alison Baird (of Speechworks), herself a consultant to other WRHA hospitals (who also could have been a resource to them), and refused moreover even to avail themselves of input from the SOGH post-stroke speech language pathologist on staff. At least once every two weeks, in 'response' to my protestations of their manipulations, they continued to badger and barrage my mother in ways where they could claim they could not understand what she was indicating, or where they would try to trick her into answering the only question they wanted her to speak to: would she like to live with me and have me take care of her (as she had implored me to promise decades ago) or would she rather be in some kind of care home? (Other options were not ever raised.) Every patient in the room with my mother had heard her vigorously deny that she had ever said "no" to living with me in any of these so-called discussions. I informed my mother many times, too, that if she had changed her mind, it would not offend me and she clearly and vehemently said "no" to that! Her mind was clear, despite the staff's attempts to make it seem clouded.
Nonetheless, when I became too much of a nuisance by advocating too strongly for my mother, and brought forward the Healthcare Directive that she had signed months before her admission, a document the courts have, when more recent, routinely recognised as superseding an older Power of Attorney document when it comes to health care decision-making, instead of halting their program, the nurse administrator in charge decided it would be easier to get rid of me by filing a false accusation. Reporting on a conversation we had 6 days after it took place, on the very day when she knew I was bringing the required certified copies of the Healthcare Directive in which my mother had named me her proxy and decision-maker, making all of their machinations both illegal and moot (they had shut me out of all "family" consultations despite WRHA policy to include all relevant perspectives), she 'remembered' that I had threatened her with a gun. Or maybe. She wasn't sure.
So she filed a complaint, not with the police, as you or I might if some stranger threatened us, but with the hospital and WRHA. Using a system that is meant to govern disputes between staff members and allow the WRHA to exercise discipline over staff, she filed a fraudulent accusation knowing that if the truth ever came to light she would receive a slap on the wrist compared to the damage I could countersue her for in civil court had she attempted the same lie with the police and courts. As an innocent person slandered, I was and am incensed. I appealed to the hospital administrator. I complained to the WRHA Patient Relations Office. I demanded a lie-detector examination be conducted. After weeks of waiting while they reviewed the situation, I was told I had no rights. The hospital would do what it wanted. If my mother's condition worsened, I would be allowed to visit. Otherwise, I am banned from Seven Oaks by the decision of a lawyer, not a judge, on the WRHA staff, whose only interest is in supporting the institution, not finding the truth.
Digression: So I ask you, gentle reader, as I stated in several of my communications with these 'people', would it make any sense to threaten the one person I knew could have me banned when my principal concern was ensuring my mother's daily happiness and well-being and when I was well aware that my mother looked forward to seeing me daily and that the staff were ignoring her? Moreover, as I was told by the Patient Relations Officer, the nurse administrator had first contacted the police and they told her she should file a complaint with them. Only after 6 days of considering the blow-back to her, she filed a charge instead with the WRHA where she can never be punished for having lied. And this is not suspect? When one of my former high school charges threatened 'to return to his locker and come back and blow my head off' -- which I knew was just adolescent bravado despite this being post-Columbine, but which I was still required to report immediately to my supervising Vice Principal -- that boy wasn't removed 6 days, later but within 60 minutes!
With me banned from the hospital, my father and brother (who has long been antagonistic towards my mother because of her understanding of my illness and support, not to make light of our long and mutual brotherly hatred) signed the papers to have my mother institutionalised. They then left for Toronto, leaving my mother with no daily visitors or support.
My father and I were allowed (that is to say, I was permitted on hospital grounds for the express purpose) to pick her up on her birthday, September 11th. The beaten-down, haggard and woeful woman wheeled down to meet me was barely the mother I had last seen less than 2 months before. When this annal continue in Part 3, we will start here.
In August, I had already learned of her being ill (more on this in a moment) from another elderly female patient, who answered my mother's phone because the staff, suspecting it was me, would not assist her. This was one of their favourite games, suggested by the nurse administrator despite the promise of her boss, the Acting CMO of the SOGH that I would be allowed to call any time, and that I would be allowed to visit if my mother's health took a downturn.
Almost every night, however, the only way I could speak with my mother was to call for the Facilities Manager (the after-hours de facto director on site) who would have to go in person most times to answer the phone him- or herself, whenever they could within the course of their real and more pressing crisis-solving duties. The nurse administrator should have been reprimanded formally for causing this alone, yet nothing was done. The Facilities Managers and I eventually settled on them calling me for my mom. That just meant that I had to sit by the phone, usually for hours each night, sometimes never receiving a call from them at all (if they were too busy or my mother were asleep by the time they came to her room).
Worse though, all but 2 of the Facilities Managers on rotation during that summer were completely complicit with the nurse administrator in lying both to me and to the Acting CMO, about my mother's declining health.
When the elderly lady answered the phone in August, she, of course, knew nothing of the real situation -- that I had been barred from visiting -- so she greeted me with a good old-fashioned berating suitable for a negligent son such as she assumed I was. It was only when she mentioned that my mom, "poor thing", looked like she had welts and "boils" all over, that I recognised how awful this hospital and its staff could be.
My mother has an auto-immune disease called bullous pemphigoid (as an aside, and weirdly enough, I just discovered this increasing less rare ailment was mentioned in passing in the very first episode of the 1990's TV medical standard, E.R.). Because the hospital had relied on my incompetent father to provide them with a list of my mother's medications at the time of admission, and because they, under direction of the malfeasant nurse administrator, steadfastly refused to allow me to review any of the information on my mother that they had, they had discontinued a critical medication and through this negligence (in both the moral/ethical and legal senses) had unnecessarily caused her illness to flare up and even worse exposed her to a risk of cancer (since the medication she requires is one that must be tapered off, never just stopped). Moreover, they knew something was wrong, as they had been trying to treat what to them was an undiagnosed condition, with Polysporin and corticosteroid creams.
(How do I know something that specific, you ask? Well, not every nurse/health care aide was afraid of the wrath of the nurse administrator, who had ordered them not to speak with me at all: yet another violation of the Acting CMO's guarantee, for which she should have been disciplined, since all family members are entitled to such general information as the state of a loved one's health.
It took me 2 days and some clever telephone calling to get through the deliberate barrier of the SOGH switchboard before I could reach a day-staffer who I was fairly certain would speak with me, but more importantly, would listen and act on the information I was calling to provide. I will probably never know how she entered it into my mom's chart/binder, but by the end of the day, mom's specialist had called me to let me know SOGH had contacted her and they were already following her prescribed course of treatment. I was so relieved that Mom was getting the remedy required to relieve her pain and suffering that I scarcely minded the ongoing lie 3 of the Facility Managers kept up that nothing at all was wrong Mom ('And who told you that?' -- imagine it demanded with menacing melodrama) and that 'of course I would be informed if there were any changes that would permit me to visit.'
Need we ask if death would have been one?
They were so efficient at covering up their incompetence and malpractice that even when my father remembered about the missed medication, the nurse administrator and her underlings pretended to him that they had been administering it all along, despite my protestations and my mother's, and despite the irrefutable evidence that the hospital's own original, undoctored (pardon the awful pun) drug dispensing logs would furnish not to forget either the testimony that would be provided by the only conscientious doctor involved in this debacle, my mother's very professional and renowned dermatologist/immunologist. God bless her for all she has done for Mom!
... to be continued
[images, notes and links to be added]
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