iN VIDEO: 'UNFATHOMABLE': Elderly Kamloops woman shuffled aside at care home
Norma Matheson, at 87 and suffering from Alzheimer’s and cancer, is in the twilight years – maybe just months – of her life.
For the past 11 years she’s been in care and for the last eight years she has lived quietly and contentedly in her room on the Elm wing of the Overlander Residential Care home in Kamloops.
That was until last week when her daughter, Catherine Matheson, got a “courtesy” phone call from the home.
“What I was told is that there was a situation that was highly confidential and urgent," Catherine told iNFOnews.ca. "They had a need for a bed in that wing and the decision had been made to move my mother and it needed to happen right away.”
The move happened that day. When Catherine was able to visit at lunchtime the next day, her mother was at a table in the middle of a large dining room in the new wing.
“As I was sitting there, someone brought over a plate of mounded food for her saying: ‘Oh, is this Edith?’” Catherine said. “’No. This is Norma.’ The food they would have given her – my mom is having trouble swallowing so she has to have minced food and she doesn’t take very much – it would have been completely wrong to give her that food.”
Catherine is not one of these whining children who complains about the well documented horrors of life in long term care. In fact, she has nothing but praise for the staff at Overlander, for how her mother has been treated over the years and even the kind and caring staff in the much larger South Park wing where her mother now resides.
Given that, it’s even more shocking that this kind of move was made with no consultation with the family – Catherine and her brother Owen visit regularly – and then shrugging Catherine off as if she was “having a temper tantrum.”
Norma does not seem capable of understanding what is happening to her – which Catherine suspects is one of the key reasons she was chosen as the resident to be moved.
“The thing about my mom is, she’s very quiet,” Catherine said. “She’s very compliant. She’s not speaking much. She’s not able to interact very much. She’s never been, in her whole life, someone to rock the boat. They didn’t say this to me but my feeling was, she seemed to them to be the easiest one to move for those kinds of reasons.”
Moving people with dementia is known to be upsetting and stressful.
Even at the Overlander, they’ve adopted an aging in place strategy, Catherine said.
“They’re practicing hospice in situ now,” she said. “They don’t just move people over to the hospice wing anymore. People have been aging in place then, through their deaths, leaving those beds.”
Norma’s health has been deteriorating of late and, even though she’s been dubbed “Nine Lives Norma” after a quick recovery from what was expected to be a fatal stroke a couple of years ago, Catherine can see it’s only a matter of time for her.
Which is why she raised a fuss with the administration the day after Norma was moved.
“What they told us was the decision is really clear,” Catherine said. “They just reiterated what had been said to me on the phone. I said how much we really disagreed with this move and it is not going to be OK for our mom. They said give us 24 hours to reconsider it and go away kind of thing. Really, all it was was a cooling off period.”
They called Catherine the next day
“Not only did they say that the decision is final, their response to me about possibly moving her somewhere else is: ‘You’re just moving her again. Are you sure you’re not just upset?’
“They’re wanting me to just settle in with this decision. I felt really desperate actually because, number one, they wanted us to go away and, number two, they told me that me being upset was not necessarily going to help my mother.”
While taking Norma home is not a viable option Catherine seriously considered it.
“That’s the level of horror that I feel about what’s happening to her,” she said.
Finding another, quieter facility for Norma would mean putting her on a two-year waiting list and she’s not likely to live that long, Catherine said.
Catherine filed a complaint to the Patient Quality Care Office and shared her story, along with a video, to the Action for Reform of Residential Care BC and Interior Association of Family Councils Facebook groups.
“It seems unfathomable that a very elderly and fragile woman was moved from the room she has lived in and called home for more than seven years so that someone else could be placed there,” the Interior Association of Family Councils posted along with the story.
“We can only hope that this is an example of a one-off situation, where a poor decision was made (recall that this is happening in a ‘person-centred’ care environment and neither the person nor her support network family physician had an opportunity to even give input into a matter that significantly impacted on her life) and that steps will be taken to rectify.”
For Catherine, she fully realizes that Norma may not understand the change and, even if she does, she’s not able to talk about it.
“All she has now is how things feel around her,” Catherine said. “She’s unable to communicate pain or anything that she’s feeling or thinking but, if you go and stand there (Elm wing) and understand that she’s been there for seven years and now you go and stand in the middle of that dining room or in that hallway (in South Park wing) there’s just a completely different vibe, a completely different feeling. And it’s loud.
“I can’t speak for exactly how she’s feeling but I’m her decision-maker and I need to speak for her when I can feel for myself how different it is.”
For its part, Overlander had nothing to say. It’s operated by Interior Health, which issued an emailed statement to iNFOnews.ca attributed to Lisa Zetes, Interior Health’s executive director, clinical operations.
“Overlander oversees care for more than 180 individuals and in rare situations there is a need to move an individual to accommodate other individuals with specific or more complex needs. This is done to ensure appropriate care, safety and security for all individuals in care.
“We recognize moving individuals is not ideal and it is never a decision we make lightly. There is not always an opportunity to consult on a move and we appreciate the concerns from this family. We are happy to discuss those with them directly. Our priority is to ensure that their loved one and all individuals at Overlander continue to receive the care they need.”
Catherine doesn’t expect her mother will be able to return to her former home on the Elm wing but doesn’t want the same thing to happen to others.
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“Even in the last month she’s changed significantly and she’s hardly even able to hold her head up right now,” Catherine said. “You’re going to put her in a wheelchair and have her sit in a dining room or a hallway? It’s not OK. And, I’m being made to feel like I’m having a temper tantrum when it’s just truly a terrible situation for my mom.”
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