While I was a contractor working in another country, my sisters were the Administrator of our mother’s care back home. First, my middle sister was in charge and later my younger sister became the Administrator of her nursing home care at the end of Mom’s life. I realize that I was missing from my mom’s care giving for nearly nine years. When I finally returned home, I saw my mom more and my younger sister continued to be Administrator. She seemed to be doing a good job so I didn’t disagree with her decisions concerning my mother. There is a lot of paperwork involved including bills and taxes etc. I only became involved when I discovered Mom’s insurance company was thinking of dropping her coverage since now she was over ninety. Insurance companies don’t like to ever payout. Upon researching her payment history, I discovered that Mom had made monthly payments continuously for nearly 15 years. The insurance company had made thousands of money from Mom who had only one leg and now they were canceling her policy and were only giving her back about two hundred of those dollars. I immediately wrote letters and made many phone calls and eventually got back a sizable portion of the money she had paid in. I literally had to shame them into giving back part of the money. This money helped to pay her burial expenses when it was time for her to go.
Little did I realize that she would become sick shortly after I returned home from Iraq? My mom contracted pneumonia inside a nursing home from another nursing home patient with the disease. This other lady with pneumonia was being allowed to freely walk from her room to the nursing home cafeteria. She sat next to my mother at the table and had this disease that Mom didn’t need to catch. Why was this other lady not fed in her room away from the other patients? Do these things happen at other nursing facilities? I believe the nursing home should know better. That was just wrong.
Then, my Mom was allowed to stay in her room at the nursing home for nearly three days with that disease before she was transferred to a nearby small hospital. Once at the hospital my sister notified me and told me to come to the hospital because my mother was dying. How could anyone be dying from pneumonia? Today there are medications. I couldn’t understand what was going on at that point. When I arrived at the hospital, I was shocked that my mother had no feeding tubes nor medication machines hooked up to her. I couldn’t understand why this was the case and I became angry with my sister who was the legal Administrator of my Mom’s care.
Why was mom not getting proper care? My sister told me that mom had signed papers saying she didn’t want to be kept alive by any machines. She signed this paper with my sister’s approval in front of some social worker. I immediately went to the hospital front desk with my son and we demanded that the hospital put feeding tubes and give my mother proper medication. They refused to help me because my sister was the administrator and they would only listen to her. I told them I was her only son and I wanted some service. All of my sisters who are supposedly religious said they agreed to go along with my younger sister and it was my Mom’s wishes.
The head nurse said for me to calm down or they would call the police. I wondered if this was America and how elderly patients were treated nowadays. My mom was 93 years old and had only one leg but she was of good sound mind, had a strong heart and lungs and it didn’t seem right that she had to die because of hospital policy and three sisters who didn’t care what I thought and were stubbornly going forward with Administrator wishes. Mom never wanted to die. I knew that. The hospital only needed to cure my mother of pneumonia. I wondered if hospitals don’t try to save patients in their nineties. It seemed very wrong to me. I considered getting a judge order to remove my sister’s administration rights but I knew there wasn’t any time to spare. My sisters and their daughters stayed in Mom’s hospital room and literally watched her die of starvation and then suffer miserably. I was very upset with their actions and attitudes. My sisters acted like they cared. After my Mom’s horrible death, I have not spoken to them for nearly two years. Do any of you have similar stories to tell about a sibling that had administrator rights that went against what you thought were right?
