COVID rules hurting lonely seniors
“I’m really in bad shape. I can’t talk to anyone,” Suzanne Brodie told her daughter last week. “I’m all alone.”
Brodie’s daughters, Taryn and Dallas, hadn’t seen their 88-yearold mother since the mid-March lockdown of her assisted living residence to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Now, she’s in Vancouver General Hospital. Brodie was admitted May 25 and since then, aside from fraught phone calls, they’ve been allowed only one 45-minute visit each.
Their mother was found lying on the shower floor in her suite at a Kerrisdale assisted living residence. She’d suffered a heart attack, several small strokes and seizures.
For the first few days, she was restrained in bed or in a wheelchair. Active until then, Brodie didn’t realize that she now needs help to get from bed to chair.
Like thousands of others in Canada, the Brodies can’t understand why it’s taking so long to lift the restrictions on family visits to care homes and hospitals when restaurants, hair salons and stores are reopening.
Not yet — that’s what the provincial health officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, said last week.
“In the coming weeks,” was as specific as she would be.
There’s no doubt the risk is high. Canada has proportionally the most deaths for long-term care residents in the world at 85 per cent of all COVID-19 deaths. And while the outbreaks are coming under control, another new one in a care home was reported June 10, bringing the total to 38 facilities that have been affected.
But the restrictions are causing immeasurable anguish — and even harm — to patients and residents.
During their brief visits, Suzanne Brodie’s daughters washed her hair and tried to ease the itchiness of a rash on their mother’s back.
“I’m perceived as the enemy,” Taryn told me. “Locking out next of kin is no way to treat the sick and the elderly. It’s not a way to healthy outcomes for anybody.”
Essential visits are allowed. But even Henry’s amended guidelines from late May aren’t definitive, leaving it open to interpretation by some unspecified someones.
Vancouver Coastal tells families to read the B.C. Centre for Disease Control’s website and tells them that final approval is given by “facilities and licensing staff.”
Island Health says on its website administrators make the decision, but that can be reviewed by the Patient Quality Office.
Essential visits include critical illness, palliative care and medical assistance in dying. But so, too, are visits “paramount to the patient/client’s physical care and mental well-being.”
The “paramount” category includes — but is not limited to — assistance with feeding, mobility, personal care, communication with persons who have hearing, visual, speech, cognitive, intellectual or memory impairment, emotional and other assistance for those with disabilities as well as pediatric care and births.
Jeanette Harper and Carmen Barclay were doing some of those things almost every day since their loved ones moved into Nanaimo’s Eden Gardens dementia care home.
Barclay went daily at supper time to see her husband. Since the lockdown, he’s become anxious and aggressive and had to be medicated. It’s taken weeks to get the dosage right. But he’s now back to being able to hold a conversation.
“He wants to see me, have me hold his hand, look him in the eye and tell him I love him and everything will be OK,” Carmen told me.
“My suggestion is they look at a family member as a part of the residents care plan and acknowledge that mental health is as important as physical health.”
Harper or her sister visited their 89-year-old mother, Marguerite Bell, every day to help with daily basics such as dressing,
brushing teeth, combing her hair and eating.
Harper worries that when they do finally see her, she won’t recognize them because their mother can no longer initiate or answer phone calls without help. FaceTime calls confuse and upset her.
Although families can’t visit, Eden Gardens CEO Erin Beaudoin emailed families earlier this month: “(We) are thinking to reintroduce some key volunteers to spend some time with the residents.
“They are no replacement to all of you but are a little something more we can offer the elders safely at this time.”
Harper was livid and contacted Island Health whose long-term care director, Tim Orr, responded by saying that Eden Gardens had misunderstood the directive.
But to be fair, the BCCDC’s website does say “existing registered volunteers” can qualify as essential visitors.
Still, Harper said, “It’s demeaning for the director to assume that we (family members) don’t understand how COVID spreads. … If families are told not to hug and maintain social distance, we would.”
Families I’ve spoken to are eager to do whatever is necessary to see loved ones — suit up in full personal protective equipment, buy and wear their own gloves and masks, continue to strictly limit their own contacts.
Just give them the rules.
We’re told care homes and hospitals are desperate for extra hands. Families could provide those as well as eyes on what’s happening, following a horrific report last month from the armed forces about conditions it found in Ontario care homes.
The National Hockey League has a plan that Henry has approved. Yet we’ve heard nothing about plans from the carehome industry and hospitals.
These restrictions aren’t forever, Henry has told British Columbians. Just for now.
But the days tick cruelly by. There’s no expectation of widely available vaccine for at least two years. And, coincidentally, that’s pretty close to the average time British Columbians spend in long-term care.
For seniors, the lockdown restriction should not be their forever.