My Mother's Haunting End

No doctor, nurse or administrator has told me that I shouldn't have had to rush from the care facility to the hospital to get her medicine. In a March 12 letter addressing a complaint I filed with the state, the medical center's interim president wrote: "It's not unusual for family members to participate in the care of their loved one by picking up medicine at the pharmacy if they chose to do so to expedite the retrieval of those medications." But I don't think most people picking up medicine are desperately trying to relieve their loved one's unbearable suffering.

No one has said that I should not have had to leave my mother's side in her dying hours. Instead, the care facility where she died has sent me a bill for plastic gloves, lotion and towels.

No one involved in those harrowing last hours has even had the decency to say they're sorry.

When I asked the doctor late last year why my mother had been allowed to die the way she did, he again hid behind Medicare rules and said that he had offered to let her stay in the hospital -- as if I would have turned him down if he had. The hospital president simply wrote, "We . . . regret that your mother's hospital experience was not positive."

Yes, I've talked to lawyers. Each has spun his own version of the same response: What happened was horrible, but the cost of taking a case to trial could be more than we would ever recover because your mother was going to die so soon. What they're really saying is that money matters most to them, too.

I have filed complaints with the Virginia state agencies that regulate medical professionals, hospitals and care facilities. An April 6 e-mail from the Department of Social Services, which regulates care facilities, said my complaint about the lack of response from aides when my mother was dying was "unfounded."

But the department never interviewed me or my mother's primary-care physician, who called a few hours after my mother died to learn what had happened, nor any of the people who had visited her in the facility. The aides were not even asked where they were when I was frantically seeking help.

The state Health Department's Office of Licensure and Certification, which oversees hospitals, also did not interview me or anyone who visited my mother in the hospital before determining that the hospital committed "no regulatory violation" related to my mother's discharge. The agency's conclusions seem based solely on my complaint letter, the hospital president's spin-city response and the incomplete and sometimes misleading medical records.

When I pointed this out to a department official a few weeks ago, he invited me to Richmond to discuss my mother's care. While I am not expecting much, at least someone in the state's medical establishment is finally willing to listen.

As galling as anything to me were the words of a hospital bean counter -- otherwise known as a risk-assessment manager -- who asked me what difference it would have made if my mother had died in the hospital rather than the way she did.

Translation: She was going to die anyway, so who really cares where and how?

I do -- passionately. And so should everyone else who has aging parents or thinks that they might one day be elderly themselves.

rpretorius@aim.com

Richard Pretorius is a former copy editor

at The Washington Post.