Our Lady of Consolation

I rated retract my rating on Our Lady-Consolation Nursing and Rehab Center. If 1 was a rating of excellence - I rate it the worse facility anyone could their parents in for rehab. My mother's and my stories would take days to explain. I can thank my primary care doctor and NS LIJ in Manhasset for saving her life. Could you image OLC discharging my mother with diaherria coming out of her personal area and recutum and not eating, drinking fluids, changing her depends ever 15 minutes. This is just the start of what she went through, Good Sam included. She is home now with 2 bags attached to her body all steming a fall. Now she can not walk and is basically laying bed. To be continued when I wrote the whole story to this unbelieve situation.

When my time comes I'd rather buy a one-way ticket to Churchill or Nome and spend my last few days chilling on an ice floe and being stalked by polar bears rather than get handled by some of the staff at this place.



Sad isn't it, how the elderly are treated in our country. So many incidents have occurred in the two months my father's been there, it's hard to say which are the most significant, it just one darn thing after another.



Here are a couple of things that happened last week. How about finding my father in a urine-soaked bed and having the aide and nurse in charge claim it was just water spilled from a pitcher which somehow left his clothes soaked with urine.



How about the theft problems? My mother was told to leave the room by an aide earlier this week and $150 disappeared from her purse while she was standing just outside the door. Same day that this new aide appeared on the ward, another visitor in the dining room reported that two bracelets had disappeared from her mother's room.



My father's roommate says he resorts to tipping the nurses and aides in order to get better service and more gentle handling as some of the aides are quite rough. So what's another 15-20% on top of the exorbitant monthly fees that are charged at many of these places? Last I heard, the monthly fee ran about $13,000.



My father had to be admitted to the ER twice after a short stay at Our Lady. First time, he developed a high fever and attempts by my mother to get someone to check him went unheeded. It wasn't until he collapsed outside and someone noticed he had 103 temp that they packed him off to the ER. Urinary track infection-- perhaps from diapers that were not changed often enough?



After treatment at the hospital he was returned to this place for 'therapy' in the hopes of regaining strength which was steadily decreasing. Within a few hours of his return, he fell flat on his face. How did this happen? Apparently he was parked in a wheel chair directly in front of the nurses' station, and no one noticed when he stood up to search for the toilet. He fell hard enough he had to be returned to the ER for catscan and/or MRI. The staff lied and said he fell out of bed and was injured in his own room. Other patients and witnesses on the floor told us he was not in bed but lined up with others from his ward by the nurses station.



Since then he's had another UTI, bed sores/blisters on his heels that looked like super-sized easter eggs. I ended up shaving him after seeing the number of cuts on his face when someone on the staff dry shaved him after we asked that he get a shower and a shave. I also had to pick him up out of the wheel chair and transfer him to the bed because he was asking for help to lie down because of back pain.



Today was the final straw. One of the staff who oversees patient discharge was unusually heavy-handed-- trying to bully the home care agency we had hired this week for 24/7 live-in care to back out of the arrangement for my father implying his condition was too far gone to be cared for at home by her aides. This same RN/social worker had threatened to call an intervention for my mother and was pressuring her to select another agency with whom it appears she had a special relationship. That other agency had demanded nearly $1500 up front for an employment agency fee which was non-refundable and would not be applied toward the weekly live-in fee of $1000. We are left wondering if there were 'referral fees' and kick backs involved??



I think it's time the attorney general and department of health take a closer look at what's going on in places like this.



Yep, when my time comes, there's got to be an ice floe with my name on it, and it sure as heck isn't Our Lady.