‘They treated my mother like she was just a number’
For 24 days, Sylvia Bailey screamed in pain from an untreated broken leg in her Niagara-on-the-Lake nursing home.
Nearly every day, Bailey’s daughter, Alison Hegarty, begged the home to X-ray her mother’s left leg for a fracture, knowing she had fallen from her wheelchair four times in the past year, hitting the floor so hard she had a permanent dent in her forehead.
Staff at Niagara Region’s Upper Canada Lodge refused to get an X-ray, making a series of mistakes that sent 75-year-old Bailey into a downward spiral that ended with her death on March 30.
The home could have done better, said Dominic Ventresca, director of seniors’ services for the municipality of Niagara Region, which runs Upper Canada Lodge and seven other nursing homes. Eighty residents live at Upper Canada Lodge.
“In the end, Alison was correct that it was a fracture and in the end, we have to acknowledge that,” Ventresca said.
“No home is perfect. They made a mistake in this case, but it was not through a lack of effort.”
The Ontario coroner’s office confirmed Wednesday that it is investigating Bailey’s death.
The Ministry of Health investigated Upper Canada Lodge last March (after the broken leg was discovered) and found six violations of the Nursing Home Act. All were related to improper pain management and not allowing Hegarty to participate in decisions regarding her mother’s care.
Hegarty says her mother’s experience shows that despite Health Ministry assertions that the nursing home system is vastly improved, families “had better be vigilant.
“I hate to think what happens to people who have no one coming in to visit them,” she said.
It has been eight years since the Star’s investigation into nursing home abuse prompted the Liberal government to promise a revolution in long-term care. Legislation has been rewritten. New programs are beginning, allowing ministry inspectors to interview residents, asking questions like “Do you feel safe here?” which Health Minister Deb Matthews has said will help identify troubled homes.
But, as Hegarty says, new rules won’t make a bit of difference if the people running nursing homes don’t treat their elderly residents with dignity.
“They treated my mother like she was just a number,” she said. “I don’t believe these places are a safe haven.”
Sylvia Bailey came to Canada from Yorkshire, England, in 1956, when she was 21 years old, and taught ballroom dancing at the Arthur Murray studio in Toronto, where she caught the eye of her future husband.
She had seven children, four boys and three girls. Hegarty, 45, was her second youngest. Bailey sewed clothes, baked bread, canned peaches and insisted her children start their day with porridge.
Bailey’s Type 1 diabetes began to dominate her health in her 40s. She got divorced in her 50s and by the time she was 65, she had gone blind. It had little impact on her personality.
Hegarty loved her mother’s humour. After she lost her eyesight, Bailey invited visitors to her home and showed them a table covered with photographs of her children. She described the accomplishments of each before reaching a picture frame filled with a blank piece of paper. She would say, “Now this is my favourite child.”
When Bailey suffered two strokes, grew frail and could no longer walk on her own, Hegarty moved in with her mother. Eventually, she quit her job and became a full-time caregiver.
By August 2008, Hegarty was sleeping just four hours a night. A bed opened up at Upper Canada Lodge, a municipally operated home, and Hegarty, exhausted, accepted it.
Bailey’s first complaint had to do with diapers. The home insisted she wear them, Hegarty said, claiming they did not have time to take Bailey to the washroom. Her mother did not need to wear diapers and found the idea of urinating on herself incredibly demeaning. Sometimes she would wait hours for staff to take her to the washroom.
She hated being bathed, naked, by a male personal support worker and wore heavy black Roy Orbison-style glasses in the tub, as a way of hiding her embarrassment.
Bailey used a wheelchair. The first time she fell out of it was in December 2009. She undid the belt. The force of the fall blackened her eyes.
She fell three more times within three months; a permanent dent in her forehead was a testament to the impact. Hegarty wanted the home to use better restraints to stop her mother from falling.
On Dec. 18, 2010, Hegarty fed her mom lunch and they had a nice visit.
As Hegarty left, she followed their usual goodbye routine, quoting actor Telly Savalas from her mother’s favourite television show, “Kojak.”
“Who loves ya baby?” Hegarty said. “You do,” replied Bailey.
The next evening, Sunday, Dec. 19, Hegarty walked into the home and could hear her mother screaming from inside her room at the far end of the hall.
A personal support worker was watching television, Hegarty said, and she asked him what was wrong with her mother. “I don’t know,” she recalled him answering.
“I went into her room and took her face in my hands. I asked, ‘Are you in pain?’ She said ‘Yes!’ I asked her where and she said ‘My knee.’ ”
She cried through supper and screamed when staff put her in the lift to move her into bed.
Hegarty told a nurse her mother was fine the day before and suggested her leg may be broken. She asked for an X-ray.
The following night, Hegarty’s friend brought Bailey’s favourite meal, fish and chips, but she ignored the food and cried. Hegarty said she asked staff again to X-ray her mother but they said it was just arthritis. Staff put heat gel on her knee.
To treat what they thought was arthritis, the home gave Bailey physiotherapy sessions,
three days in a row, twisting her legs until the screams became unbearable. Then they gave her Tylenol.
Her mother’s doctor was away on vacation. Hegarty asked staff to get their on-call doctor to order an X-ray. Nothing happened.
Bailey cried so hard, every day, that the home had her assessed for dementia. As a followup, the nurses asked Hegarty to take her mom to a neurologist who, she said, concluded that her mother had slurred speech from previous strokes but was mentally sharp.
By the time Bailey’s doctor returned to work on Jan. 10, Hegarty had asked the home for an X-ray nearly every day. By now Bailey’s leg had turned black and green.
The doctor came in to see her. He immediately ordered an X-ray. It was done the following day, at the nursing home.
That night, 24 days after she first asked for an X-ray, a nurse called Hegarty with the results: her mother had a fractured tibia, or shin bone, just below her knee.
But the next day, staff at the home told her the X-ray was fuzzy and the results were inconclusive. Hegarty said she told the nurse that her mother’s leg was turning black and green. On Jan. 23, the home agreed to send her to St. Catharines General Hospital, where doctors confirmed the break. They set her leg in a splint and she was sent back to the nursing home.
Hegarty noticed other problems. Her face was bright red, and she had pain in her stomach. Hegarty said her mother suffered from numerous bladder infections in the home.
Eventually, sky-high blood sugar levels put Bailey back in the hospital.
Hegarty recalls seeing her there. “Mom was sleeping. She squeezed my hand. Eventually she woke up, and she gave me a huge smile, but she was burning up. Her lips were covered in blisters from the fever.”
Her mother died on March 30. Ventresca said the staff did their best to care for Bailey, who had complex health issues.
Bailey’s death record, from the Niagara Health System, listed her immediate cause of death as sepsis, a severe illness in which the bloodstream is overwhelmed by bacteria. Additional causes were pneumonia and colitis.
Two days later, when Hegarty went back to Upper Canada Lodge to collect her mother’s clothes and photographs, she said a senior staff member came into the room.
“Everything has to be cleared out,” Hegarty recalled her saying.
“There’s a new resident moving in.”