I realize this is really no big deal, but I’m kinda pissed off and need to vent.
My grandmother (who will be 90 this next Saturday) has lived in this nusing home for almost a year. I visit often, four or five times a week. I have made sure that the staff knows who I am and I’m an active particpant in her care. I visit at different times of the day to keep the aids and nurses on their toes; I want my grandmother to be treated well, and I think I’ve been successful in ensuring that.
Not long after she moved in, some of her clothing came up missing. At one point, she had zero pairs of panties. Zero. Then it was some of her pants and shirts… To remedy this, I started doing all of Grandma’s laundry myself. Things were fine for a while, until they moved her to a busier hall where they could check on her more frequently. Her new room is more spacious and she has a lovely bay window with a large marble ledge. I bought her 3 starter plants and put them there, to give Grandma something to look at/ think about. A couple months later, one of the plants disappeared, the one that had doubled in size. That pissed me off so I brought it up to the social worker during a care plan meeting.
Today I went to visit Grandma & deliver her clean clothes. She had NO hangers. And, another of her plants was gone. This time, the thief took the plant out of the pot & left the soil. UGH! So I told the nurse on duty and not ten minutes later, one of the admins brought in a huge Mother In Law Tongue (?) which is one of the ugliest plants I’ve ever seen. I was also promised that new starter plants would be purchased to replace the stolen ones. During my conversation with the head nurse, it was mentioned that the home has new hires & with new people, they always get complaints of theft. Thank god we’ve refused Grandma’s demands to keep cash in her room.
And the whole time I’m thinking, "Why the fuck would someone steal a goddamn plant??? I mean really! They’re cheap at the grocery store. And what’s more, the thief(s) take the prettiest ones. Well, that’s understandable I suppose. It just gets my goat that someone would take a freaking plant from a little old demented lady who doesn’t get much pleasure in life. I mean, she refuses to do any activities or even physical therapy. She’s essentially waiting for her time to take the Big Nap.
Fucking no good asshole thieves…
After reviewing this post, I see that I could have left out half of this info and still gotten the point across. Sorry. I don’t mind if this thread sinks like a stone. I just needed to let off some steam. I feel a bit better now.
At my mother’s assisted-living facility, I have all her clothes labeled, and things still go missing from the laundry. Bras, dresses, sweaters. People wander vaguely in, take things, and wander vaguely out again. It’s not like you can blame people with Alzheimer’s, so there’s nothing we can do about it. I’m going broke replacing her clothes, though.
Fortunately, things have not been going missing from her apartment–that I know of . . .
Sometimes it’s not the staff that takes things but the other patients. Not because they are thieves, but because they have diminished mental capacity and just walk off with stuff. My grandma’s dentures ended up AWOL one day that way …
Yeah, we had it better when Grandma was in her assisted living apartment. Nothing went missing.
And we label every article of clothing too. I think the underwear thing was all about other residents not having clean panties so the aids would “borrow” Granny’s panties. EWWW. After a couple complaints to the staff, the social worker bought a couple packs of undies to replace the missing ones.
But now she doesn’t wear panties. She’s on diapers full time. You’d think that would be better when it comes to doing laundry, but no. Granny has decided it’s too much bother to ask for help to the bathroom (she hasn’t been able to walk since she broker her hip last November), so she just pees and pees till her diaper is saturated along with her slacks. To give you an idea of how this works, I saw her Saturday & picked up her dirties for laundering. She had three pairs of pants in her closet. Last night when Mom visted, she had NO clean pairs of pants. SIGH.
Damn, now I’m ranting about Grandma and not the subject at hand. I know she can’t help it & she’s going down hill. I just get a little overwhelmed with the whole deal, yanno?
Oh I know. I’m not 100% sure that it’s the staff. I know a good portion of the residents there are confused. But the thing is, there are only a couple patients who walk. Everyone else is in a wheelchair or confined to their bed.
Exactly - I was talking to somebody a few weeks ago about how embarassed they used to be about their mother, that they’d go in about every week and figure out which clothes, jewelry, dentures, etc, weren’t hers, and then quietly hand it over to the nurses. It’s funny, because when my grandmother was in a nursing home that was her roomate - we were always looking for her stuff! (Dentures! Good lord!)
Tell me about it. My kid lost his PS2 while visiting my mother-in-law at her nursing home. I don’t know who took it, but I’m betting it was staff. Whoever it was, the hell with them.
A bunch of my grandpa’s stuff went missing. Turned out he either left it somewhere, or gave it away, or some other old coot wandered off with it. I don’t doubt there is some theft going on, but I am skeptical that it is “common”.
I mean, think about. Who is going to risk a job for socks and underware? Money and jewelry? Sure.
My grandpa’s shit always turned up being worn by someone else. And there was the one time he was found in bed with some woman…
I agree that it’s likely patients in a dementia haze who wander in and walk out with stuff. It’s probably not the staff; the nursing home employees that I’ve met are good people. They do difficult, unpleasant work and I take my hat off to anyone with the patience and compassion to do it.
When my gran was in a nursing home, jewelry started disappearing. Someone took several patients’ watches and, heartbreakingly, their wedding rings. The administration set up security cameras and caught the thief on tape. It turned out to be the drug-addict grandson of one of the patients. He used to duck into bedrooms and pocket whatever he could find to pawn. He was taped removing rings from one old lady’s fingers as she slept. Despicable.
Before she passed, clothes used to go missing from my Mom’s assisted living apartment all the time. Then my sister (the one with the temper) went down and insisted they call the police and file a police report on the ‘stolen items’. The administrator made a quick angry phone call and then worked to calm sis down for 20 minutes. Then she suggested that they both look again as maybe sis had ‘over-looked’ them.
Amazingly, a closet with no sweaters 20 minutes before now had 3 cashmere ones hanging in it (Mom’s name was on the collar tags of each one; they were definitely hers).
My aunt thought my grandmother’s panties were being stolen from her room at the nursing home, but then discovered my grandmother was giving them away to the other patients. Gran’s rationale was that she wanted new underwear and my aunt had told her that she didn’t need any.
Sometimes I really think Gran’s enjoying her dementia.
People steal plants from public gardens… whenever I see gardeners from City Hall at work, I know that next day I’ll see areas that are mostly-new-plants and a few holes.
Cervaise, what ended up happening in your grandma’s case? Was anyone ever punished?
How is your grandpa doing? That was such a sad story. I worked in a retirement / nursing home for a time and I know how hard it is, but it was a good one and I never saw anything close to that bad. My grandmother is in that same home now.
My grandma has had stuff go missing all the time, from junk jewelry to her TV (went out for “repairs”, an older model was returned).
The problem is that she has dementia (she phoned us once accusing us of stealing her spoon collection) and may be giving some things away, it’s hard to tell. We always make it clear to the home when we notice something large missing, but as for the little things - we just make sure her valuable stuff isn’t there.
I have always felt that the staff at nursing homes are either one step away from some kind of jail term. Either just about to go in or just released. I don’t mean this in a negative way, just stating 6 years of observation from the Group Home stand point. Under educated people staff the place doing a thankless job on a forgotten segment of society. (We are all suppose to be healthy, rich, beautiful white people, dontcha know?)
That is why when my brother was in a god forsaken group home anything I took to him ( movies, books and magazines) were ok to lose. My mom labeled everything with our last name in big fat letters so no one would steal it.
Frankly, the reason why I took all those VHS tapes to the place was so they would get stolen. I got them all back when he died. Thanks ma!
Not to my knowledge, no. After my grandmother died my grandfather clearly just wanted to move on. Nobody really wanted to argue with him; the topic pretty much faded away. As was mentioned in that thread, that’s apparently what happens; people get emotionally fatigued and just walk away.
Me, I wanted to sue them into bloody shrapnel, but it wasn’t my choice to make.
He’s good. Keeping busy. Amusingly enough, he has discovered email, and uses it as a cross between a blog and a family newsletter. He’ll send a message to some person on some subject and drag everybody in his address book to the cc line. I’ve heard some people bellyaching about his daily (at least) emails, wondering why they should care about how he decided to choose this color of hanging flowerpot instead of that color, but I think it’s sort of sweet. I know more about what’s going on in his life now than I ever did, and I’ll miss it a lot when he goes.
From what I saw of nursing homes in my EMT days, if I have the energy and coordination to put a bullet in my own head, I will do that before moving into 75% of the “skilled nursing facilities” I have seen.
Theft, physical and sexual abuse, neglect, its horrid. Most places at least seem to try, but there is always a couple facilities on the way down in any decent sized city. The handful of truly skilled and caring people are by far outnumbered by those who would be fired in a week in any kind of acute care environment.
