THE UNHEARD VOICES
We speak to residents in Ireland’s nursing homes
ON a January day, Maggie Timmons’s father swept her up and carried her outside into the cold air. She was four or five years old and hot with a fever caused by measles.
“I had a very great temperature. I remember my father taking me out and standing me on a big block to cool down. When I cooled down, he brought me in and put me back into bed. That’s all I remember about it,” she says.
The child survived her father’s desperate efforts to ease the symptoms of a highly contagious disease that killed many children.
At the age of 102, Maggie Timmons — born in the year of the Spanish influenza pandemic — is facing down the second deadly viral infection in her lifetime.
In the Oak View nursing home in Co Cavan, she keeps to her room. Carers and nurses bring her news and chat and she follows the news on the television about the progression of Covid-19, which, as of last week, had spread to 246 nursing homes.
“I wasn’t frightened at the start. But I didn’t think it was so bad. It was only later I discovered that it was so bad,” she says. Since lockdown, she longs for her regular outings to check on her garden in her countryside home outside Belturbet. “I used to get out for a few hours every day to go home … It was getting out and getting around my garden. That has all stopped,” she says.
She spends days “sitting here, wondering when is the day it will all be over?” she says. “I listen to it on television, hoping that something will come soon.”
Maggie is one of 25,000 older people living in nursing homes around the country. If health workers are the frontline defence against this disease, then older people are its main target. More than 55pc of the 1,500-plus deaths to date are among residents of nursing homes, according to the Department of Health.
Debate has raged about the failure to anticipate the impact of the coronavirus on nursing homes in Ireland. The health authorities have pointed out that the experience here is no different to most other countries, although the death rate is slightly higher. Dr Tony Holohan, the chief medical officer, has stood by his insistence that it wasn’t necessary for nursing homes to close to visitors, when private nursing homes were advised to do just that. He rescinded that advice five days later.
Healthcare staff, nurses, the lobby group Nursing Homes Ireland and the trade unions have had their say. Families have been speaking out for loved ones. The voices we’ve heard least are of those most directly impacted by the coronavirus and most imperilled by it: the people who live in nursing homes. What is it like to live in confinement, hoping to ward off an encroaching virus that has claimed the lives of 948 residents of long stay care facilities, of which 823 were residents of nursing homes.
Sitting in her private room at Oak View nursing home in Belturbet, Sheila Sheehan has been “terrified” watching the progress of the coronavirus unfold on the television news, which she follows avidly. “I heard about it first in other countries, of course. I couldn’t believe when it came to Ireland,” says Sheila.
“I was just very scared in the beginning, because I didn’t know what was happening. At first, I thought once you got it, that’s it. Once it comes in here, we’ll all be gone. Then I realised that people have been recovering from it.”
She says the nursing home staff have been wonderful in keeping all of the residents informed on the steps they were taking to keep the virus out, including closing to visitors before the public health authorities had advised it.
Staff at Oak View managed to keep the virus at bay until early April, when two of its residents who had been in Cavan General Hospital tested positive after they were discharged back into the nursing home, according to Geraldine Donohoe, director of care. Two residents who died tested positive and a third was a suspected case. More than nine people were cohorted in a separate part of the facility but the outbreak is now under control.
Sheila was shielded from these cases, and does not speak about how they impacted on her.
“We stay in our rooms, a lot of us anyway,” says Sheila. “The first week or 10 days I was completely closeted in my bedroom, completely. But then we got face masks and with the face masks on I can walk the corridor here, which is great, just to get a break.”
The decision to close the nursing home to visitors has impacted on her quality of life but she believes it was the right thing to do.
“From my point of view, I couldn’t go out at weekends to see my daughter. Naturally you miss it, but it has been for our own good, of course,” she says.
Now her daughter visits once a week, pulling up in the car park and talking to Sheila on the phone from outside. She leaves a box, usually something to satisfy her sweet tooth, which is quarantined for 24 hours so she has to wait a day before she gets it. “That’s the system they have here.”
Sheila worries that the restrictions will be eased too soon and, as she puts it, “we will be back at square one”.
Her message to the Government is to err on the side of caution: “I am terrified that they will open it all up too soon. I miss going out to my daughter at the weekend. But I think it is worth making the effort,” she says. “I know they say you can fight it if you get it, but why should we have to start all over again, you know?”
Down the corridor, Mary Jo O’Flaherty comes on the phone to say she is “not one bit worried” about the virus. “Everything came very quickly, it was a surprise to us. But we’ve got used to it now and I’m not one bit worried that things will [not] turn out all right,” she says.
She personally doesn’t feel lonely in lockdown and say she has “plenty” to occupy herself with in the nursing home.
But she would like to see a gradual return to normality so that she can once again see her children and grandchildren.
“You have to go by the rules but I think they should relax it a bit anyway … Yes, we miss the visitors. I suppose we can’t do anything about that, but I suppose it will come back to normal,” she says. “I am quite calm. I am not one bit worried. I feel safe here, I am quite happy and I will be here until the end of my life,” she says.
She knew one of the residents who passed away — a lady who she used to see in the dayroom. “She did pass away, yes,” was all that she would say.
“I mean you have to take life as it comes to you. I would not be scared of it. I am not that kind. I have seen death.”
The residents of Oak View forged their formative years in the harsh decades of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, emerging as a generation of stoics.
Maggie Timmons, at 102 years old, says she is not afraid that she might contract Covid-19. “To be quite honest, I never do think about it. If I’m going to get it, I’ll get it and if I don’t, I don’t. There is no use worrying and going mad about it either,” she says.
She lost two of her children, most recently her son. “He was at home and he looked grand, and he went outside the door, he came back. He told me he’d go up to bed for a wee rest. And then he comes downstairs after about half an hour. I heard him come down the hall and the next, down.”
His death put Covid-19 in perspective. “Could anything worse than that happen? I don’t think so.
“I have lost two sons the same way,” she says. “I think about them all the time.”
Maggie and her husband, John, are coming up to 70 years married, a milestone that would ordinarily be celebrated in the nursing home, where she says she has lived happily for four years.
She thinks the Government and Health Minister Simon Harris are “doing their best”.
Like Mary Jo, she would like the Government to gradually ease restrictions: “I think they should do it on a regulated basis, not all of a sudden. But to be open to visits would be very, very nice, to come back to some form of normality that seems to be gone.”
The day she gets out to see her garden cannot come soon enough. “To go out and look around it is all I have to do with it. There’s nothing done this year so far because the garden centres were all closed down,” she says.
“I am just taking it day by day, hoping that this will soon be over so that we can get back to some sort of normality.”
This is what we can learn from a centenarian whose life has been bookended by two pandemics.
‘I can’t go out at weekends to see my daughter. Naturally you miss it, but it has been for our own good.’ Sheila Sheehan ‘You have to go by the rules but I think they should relax it a bit.’ Mary Jo Flaherty