Our seniors deserve much better care
2020 This past year showed we need to value our seniors, Pamela Cowan writes.
2020 has been a year like no other. As it wraps up, the Saskatoon Starphoenix and Regina Leader-post have invited community members to submit personal essays reflecting on the current crisis. Today: Longtime reporter Pamela Cowan.
As each December winds down, I anticipate flipping the calendar to a new year — as if the simple act of turning a page brings the promise of better days ahead.
The year 2019 had been tough, but my father's fall on New Year's Eve was a harbinger of the much greater heartache 2020 had in store.
Earlier in 2019, as Dad's health deteriorated, my family began the desperate search to find him a long-term care bed, but all publicly funded care homes in Regina were full. At one home, the waiting list stretched to more than three years.
When you're 92 and your health is rapidly declining, you cannot wait three years.
Even if a bed had been available, the options were dismal.
Too many care homes had four patients crammed into a room. No privacy — just curtains, a bed and bedside table separating seniors — like warehousing cattle.
The cracks in long-term care were always there, but it has taken a pandemic and the deadly toll at crowded nursing homes across Canada for the public to understand the dangerous and dehumanizing conditions in which many seniors live.
We were told we'd have to move Dad to the first available bed in a care home outside of Regina.
That, I told social workers, would be the end of Dad. Close contact with family means everything to him.
There were private options, but who could afford their stratospheric rates? Not our family.
In a desperate bid for a bed at Wascana Rehabilitation Centre, I applied to Veterans Affairs in October to have Dad's years in the Royal Canadian Navy recognized.
To our amazement, Veterans Affairs swiftly approved Dad as a veteran and in November he had a new home at Wascana. The staff are wonderful and we felt blessed — until New Year's Eve when Dad slipped and broke his pelvis.
He could no longer use his walker, but had to park his pride and use a wheelchair. He hated the belt restraining him in the wheelchair. He detested his loss of independence. Family visits helped ease the transition.
Then came the pandemic. Wascana Rehabilitation Centre, like other long-term care facilities across Saskatchewan, closed its doors to family.
As a former nurse and health reporter, my heart and head were at odds.
I knew the vulnerable must be protected from the deadly virus, but I missed seeing my Dad and he missed his family.
Within weeks, the mental and emotional toll of isolation were obvious. Dad laughed less and forgot more.
Happier days returned in June when outside visits were allowed and two designated family members could visit the unit twice a week.
The first day visiting restrictions lifted, I walked onto Dad's ward and nearly cried.
Men who had been alert, and even flirty at times, stared vacantly into space. There was no cheerful banter. There were no words.
Often as I was leaving the unit, veterans in wheelchairs were lined up at the locked door waiting for their chance to escape the ward.
“Please, please let us out,” implored one veteran. “We are prisoners here.”
Family and residents were gradually adjusting when the second lockdown of long-term care homes came — days before my Dad's 93rd birthday. He spent it without family and friends.
Staff set up Facetime sessions with my brother and I, and we watched him open presents. Later they sent us pictures of
Dad beside a huge cake, but there were no hugs, no kisses.
The hardest moment of 2020 came recently when, during our daily phone call, I asked Dad what he'd like for Christmas.
“I want to go home with you,” he replied.
I had to say no, but I felt tremendous guilt. He's watched most of spring, summer and fall from the windows inside an institution.
The guilt intensifies when I recall the many, many times he and Mom were there when I needed them the most. And now, when Dad needs me, I'm denying him his dearest wish.
Mixed with my guilt is rage. I am infuriated by the people parading their ignorance not far from the front doors of Wascana.
One anti-masker carried a sign declaring the pandemic a scam, another proclaimed that lockdowns kill.
Lockdowns erode the spirit, but the virus kills the body.
At the beginning of this nightmare, mixed messages about masks were confusing. Now we know they prevent the spread of the virus, so why is there any debate about wearing them and staying home?
The Saskatchewan I love is known for neighbours helping neighbours. We've all heard stories of farmers working collectively to take off a harvest when there's illness or sudden death.
For decades, the people of this great province have opened their hearts and their wallets to support Telemiracle and our most vulnerable.
Now is the time to band together again to fight a common enemy — the virus, not our medical professionals, who have worked tirelessly, or restrictions that will be temporary if we all just follow them now.
When I turn the calendar page on this year, it is with hope a vaccine is on the horizon and before the end of 2021, all of us will be able to reunite and celebrate life's milestones with each other.
But we must take the lessons learned in 2020 and make them a priority in the new year and the years ahead: to provide our seniors with affordable care homes where all have the dignity of safe, private living spaces that they can be proud to call home.
They deserve so much better.