Better Off Dead: America's Nightmare Nursing Home System

By michael angelo

Our nationwide nursing home industry is regularly complicit in all manner of crimes against the very people it is paid exorbitant fees - up to $92,000 annually - to protect. Residents suffer the atrocities of emotional; physical, and sexual abuse; neglect; theft of property; falsification of documentation; medication errors; surgical mistakes, and sometimes murder.    The victims include our families, and one day, perhaps, ourselves. From administrators down to lowest paid staff members, the people hired to protect our families often work under the influence of drugs and alcohol and engage in sexual encounters while on the job.

Today's news headlines scream of a helpless nursing home resident, comatose for over a decade, who delivered a son, after being raped by a male nurse. Even a cursory online search reveal that complaints have been filed in 49 of 50 states plus the District of Columbia this month alone. REFORM IS NEEDED!

• Language: English
• Publisher: michael angelo
• Release date: Oct 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393926290

Book preview

TABLE OF CONTENTS - PAGES 2-4     

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS - PAGES 5-6

PREFACE - PAGES 6-13

INTRODUCTION - PAGES 15-23

IN THE BEGINNING - PAGES 24-29

CHAPTER 1. CELL PHONE USE - PAGES 30-35

ABSENTEEISM - PAGES 36-42

TARDINESS - PAGES 43-46

CHAPTER 2.  A. STAFF ABUSE - PAGES 47-54

B. RESIDENT ABUSE - PAGES 55-72

CHAPTER 3.  MEDICATIONS - PAGES 73-82

MEDICATION ERRORS 83-87

DRUG ABUSE - PAGES  88-95

CHAPTER 4. FALSIFYING DOCUMENTATION PAGES 96 - 103

CHAPTER 5. THEFT OF PROPERTY - PAGES  104-108

CHAPTER 6.  DEATH - PAGES  109-127

CHAPTER 7. A TYPICAL WORKDAY SHIFT - PAGES 131-156

CHAPTER 8.  SEX ON THE JOB - PAGES  155-185

CHAPTER 9.  THE LOCAL SCENE - PAGES 189-193

NOT ANY BETTER ACROSS STATE LINES - PAGES 194-195

MY TWO HOSPITAL EXPERIENCES - PAGES  196-206

SOME NICE STORIES - PAGES 207-213

CHAPTER 10. THE FINAL CHAPTER -

MY FINAL TWO JOBS - PAGES  216-223

MY FINAL INTERVIEW PAGES 224-227 

MY RESIDENTS - PAGES 228-232

MUSINGS – PAGES 233-235

POSTSCRIPT - PAGES 231-234

BACK COVER – PAGE 235

*Except for author; family, and friends, the names; places, and situations in this book are purely fictional. Any similarity to someone or someplace in real life is merely coincidental.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’d like to thank the God that I believe in for life, as beautiful and brutal as its been; and for allowing me to be one of the helpers instead of the helpless; for the gifts of His Son and my Savior, Jesus, and the redemption and salvation that He offers us all; for His Word and a set of rules to live by; and for His grace and forgiveness, because I have broken every one of those rules in either word; thought, or deed.

I’d like to thank my Mother, Ruth, who, in all her brokenness, always encouraged my dreams and urged me to commit all my ways to the Lord.

I’d like to thank all the preachers and the teachers; the counselors and the cops; and the Christians and the killers who saw the goodness in me, encouraging me to write books; they believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself.

I’d like to thank Miss June, the most intelligent and empathetic of all my nursing home residents, and a true friend, too, who begged me relentlessly to write this book. I’d like to thank Steve, my good buddy who lives in a nursing home, who has been with me every single day; he wants to write his own book, because he’s endured what I have written about. His friendship has strengthened me.

I’d like to thank all the health care workers of integrity, both friends and strangers, who work tirelessly for the betterment of mankind, at a great cost to themselves; they include RN Steve, who unhooked me from a ventilator after I lay dying in an ICU. He offered encouragement, insisting, as so many others did, to write these truths. He also proved a model of inspiration as he labored tirelessly, working alongside me in the most dysfunctional institution I ever endured.

I’d like to especially thank all librarians everywhere; they have always proved some of the most helpful people on earth; I hope to publish this book and others and add immensely to their workload!

Forevermore I will be haunted by the entreating voices of my nursing home residents, brokenly and dejectedly pleading with me to help them die.  I’d be better off dead, scores of them earnestly explained with a sense of settled finality. The title of this book isn’t mine, it’s theirs. Helpless to assist them in their wish, a very real but intangible part of me died along with them, daily, at every indignity that they suffered. This book is for them.

Preface

HOW MUCH BETTER FOR us if all humans died in costly nursing homes amid doctors who lie, nurses who lie, friends who lie, as we have trained them, promising life to the dying ...

-The devil’s emissary, Screwtape

C.S. LEWIS, 1942

The Screwtape Letters

Attention, please, especially those of you nearing retirement age! This is my clarion call to anyone contemplating nursing home placement, being trumpeted to you after having worked as a health care professional for almost 30 years. I share these truths in the fervent hope they will act as a catalyst to inspire some badly needed nursing home reform, and that the lives of millions of young and old alike might be improved.

Here are some Family Caregiving Alliance statistics we should all hope we don’t become part of. There are 1.5 million people nationally living in nursing homes.  Almost 10 million Americans, 65 years or older, need help from the five main types of long term services and support to help them with their daily activities. By 2050, this number will jump to 27 million people.

Senior Living states the cost of assisted living nationally averages $119.00 per day; $3,628 per month, and $43, 536 annually. The average annual cost of nursing home care is between $82,128.00 and $92,376.00.

According to the Leapfrog Group from October 2013, up to 440,000 people die annually from preventable hospital errors. According to US News and World Report, Medical errors are the 3rd leading cause of death in America now, after heart disease and cancer, causing 250,000 deaths per year. These numbers were the ones that couldn’t be covered up; I imagine the figures reflect only the tip of the proverbial iceberg: Read ‘em and weep.

Patient safety efforts fall far short of what a perfect world might hope to attain, so I urge you to take good care of your health! Do everything in moderation.  Eat healthy. Exercise. Prayer, too, has proven scientifically healthy. First and foremost, please try to keep your families together! If this advice proves impossible or unfeasible, at least investigate any facility that you might do business with. Do your homework! Talk to people; read reviews; inspect the nursing homes yourself.

Remember, when you’re searching for nursing home placement:  Their written creed, framed and prominently displayed on their wall, isn’t worth the paper it’s written on! It contains duplicity; mendacity, and putrid platitudes. It means nothing to them! They are in it for the money! The God’s honest truth would read something like the following:

"Here at the Last Gasp Nursing Home, our corporate policy is to fill every bed for as long as possible: That is our true manifesto. Sell your house and whatever else it takes! We’ll pick up the other end by often billing the government for services we don’t always provide. We may overcharge you up to ninety thousand dollars annually for our so-called compassionate care of your spouses; parents, or grandparents, but despite our exorbitant fees:

Our nurses; CNAs (Certified Nurses’ Aides) and other employees are overworked and underpaid, to the point where some supplement their incomes by prostitution or selling the drugs they rob from our residents. They may steal your mother’s jewelry; they may plunder your dying father’s Vicodin for their own consumption, or for resale.  Some of our employees are alcoholics; drug abusers, and compulsive gamblers. Some couldn’t keep their vices under check if their jobs, or indeed their very lives, depended on it, and they may choose to indulge those vices while on company time. While your loved one may be hungry; injured; wet and soiled, or lying near death, we reserve the right to do any and all the following:

Our Administrator’s lover may film himself smoking dope on the job and then post it to social media. Our Social Services Director may choose to have sex with the supply clerk before your mother receives her essentials such as soap; shampoo, and toilet paper. Our Admissions Coordinator may tell you whatever it takes to entice you to leave your family member here. Our DON (director of nursing) may have been repeatedly arrested for driving while drunk. Our Dietary help may also have sex with each other during work hours; they may consume alcohol while preparing meals; and they often heavily salt the food of your hypertensive grandmother.

Our charting may be falsified as needed in order to prevent us from being fined by the state or sued and shut down for either abuse or neglect.  We reserve the right to change both Administrators and the name of this facility as often as needed. Thank you for your patronage"

...

I do not claim all nursing homes are bad. However, I do state that after three decades in the health care field, I have yet to find one that was all good.

They didn’t wish to hear it, but just as I repeatedly wrote to all those corporate headquarters and state governing bodies when I blew the whistle on my employers, I once again repeat to you:

I feel I would be remiss in my moral responsibilities, both as a nurse and, indeed, as a human being, if I did not try my best to warn folks what fate may await them if they are placed in a residential care facility.  I am not some Chicken Little yelling that the sky is falling and trying to make an exploitational buck. I’m not a fear monger, cranking out some Jerry Springer-type expose or a pulp fiction novel. I would be glad to undergo a polygraph examination in order to prove that my story is accurate and truthful. Whether you believe me or not, I heartily recommend the following books:

Death Without Dignity, by Steven Long; The Death Shift, by Peter Elkind; The Good Nurse, by Charles Graeber; Radical Loving Care, by Erie Chapman; Prepare to Defend Yourself - How to Navigate the Healthcare System and Escape with Your Life, by Matthew Minson, MD; and Nursing Home Nightmares by Dr. Glenn Molette.

These books, as well as today’s headlines, will corroborate what I say about the health care system: It is, in fact, regularly complicit in all manner of abuse and neglect against the very people it is being paid to protect, and the crimes it is guilty of sometime include murder.

I can honestly say the title of my book accurately reflects what I feel, and the way my residents felt. As an Alzheimer’s Unit charge nurse for the last 20 years, I fervently believe if I were to wind up being placed in a nursing home, especially one owned by a for-profit corporation, I would be better off dead.  Do these words sound too audacious? Does my tone sound too vociferous?

Before you decide, read the December 29th, 2018 news article about the 29-year-old female Arizona nursing home resident who gave birth to a boy that day, while having been in a vegetative state for over a decade. Not one staff member claimed to know she was pregnant. Medical professionals at the facility did not learn of her pregnancy until she went into labor. Family are outraged; traumatized, and in shock. The long-term CEO has resigned. Update: Today, less than a month later, her male LPN (licensed practical nurse) was charged with her rape.

Even a cursory online look reveals complaints filed in 49 of 50 states, as well as in Washington D.C. The nation-wide, for profit nursing home industry is rife with abuse; corruption; neglect, and sexual immorality.

Welcome to America’s nightmare nursing home system. The health care system is broken and deeply flawed. I don’t believe it can be fixed.  Part of the reason is that we all, as fellow human beings, are broken and deeply flawed.  Yet together we should demand change.

I write this now as an out of work registered nurse, gratefully collecting unemployment benefits awarded to me by the state, after having been unjustly fired from my most recent position.

And folks, it will truly be my last stint as a nurse. As the years have flown, I have found it increasingly difficult, and frequently impossible, to effectively care for my residents’ safety and well-being.

For decades, those who love me most have seen with their own eyes what I shall now relate to you; they have queried me both incredulously and stridently, Why don’t you just quit, and find another career?! Today, as I begin this book I have been repeatedly urged to write for decades, I hope to do just that.

Allow me to pull up the rock that hides the for-profit nursing home field. Look underneath, into the world I very recently left behind. Feel, and hear, and smell, and see some of what my chosen career field paid me to be part of. Even if you don’t believe in any Gods, you still might consider praying you never have to go down into this system I just crawled out of, and to have the rock close in over you.

Every incident is factually true. No creative license has been taken in presenting what I believe to be the whole truth and nothing but the truth. 

INTRODUCTION

DO NOT REBUKE AN OLDER man harshly, but exhort him as if he were your father...

Timothy 5:1

I’m an Alzheimer’s Unit registered charge nurse. My employer-provided job descriptions never included the following:

Throughout the decades, upon arriving at work, I’ve gagged and almost vomited hundreds of times; choking on the smell of urine and defecation that permeated the nursing home hallways.

Residents are supposed to be checked, and their wet bedding and clothing changed, every two hours throughout the night. It frequently doesn’t happen. It’s much easier and less bother for the night shift to sit and watch TV, or use their cellphones, or to sleep, and to do their rounds only once in the early morning hours, instead of three times throughout the night.

The results of their dereliction of duty ensures that the urine and uric acid and the defecation smeared against residents’ skin breaks down the tissue when left too long. This leads to skin rash, first, and then bed sores, or decubiti, which are huge open areas of

Reviews for Better Off Dead

[Delores Cryder · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

While everything the author is saying plus more is true, this book is written by someone who spent their entire working life in a facility and did nothing to change the the industry. Its written by a bitter person that perhaps near got the promotion he felt he deserved. I also am a nurse in a skilled nursing facility, I also have seen and experienced way to much trauma and abuse. Not every facility is bad, not every bad facility is all bad. He sounds like a multitude of people I have worked with that love pointing out the faults and laziness of others while extolling their own perfection. He is a large part of the problem and while he whines and cries he is still not helping fix the problems. He is as guilty as the people he is calling out.