Hell has nothing on a nursing home

Warning: this post contains adult language and subject matter. Discretion is advised.

Do you remember John Wayne’s last film? My readers abroad, who I can’t thank enough for being here, may not. So, in short, the plot goes like this:

Aging gunfighter John Bernard Books rides into Carson City in January of 1901, seeking the opinion of Doc Hostettler (James Stewart). He is worn out, grizzled and his time has clearly passed as he sees when he arrives. A streetcar pulled by a horse goes past. The marshall (Harry Morgan) will inform him later that the following year, the streetcar will be electric-powered. Not something a man in his prime in the 1880s would be familiar with to any but a passing degree.

Books had seen a doctor in Creed, Colorado, but didn’t believe his diagnosis, so he rode out the next day to see Hostettler, who had once saved his life.

Books lived his life by simple rules: “I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to others, and I require the same from them.” And so he’s killed over 30 men. In the territories that was how it very often went except 30 is a pretty high number. Today Books would be called a serial killer.

He sees Hostettler and gets the same news the doctor in Creed gave him: terminal cancer. But in one of the most remarkable scenes, Hostettler says, “There will be an increase in the severity of the pain. No drug will moderate it.” He says Books will lie in bed and scream and if he’s lucky he will lose consciousness. He then says something I found very profound: “I would not die a death like I just described. Not if I had your courage.”

Cancer is a horrible way to go. In the end, Books chooses as Hostettler suggests and goes out on his own terms in a shootout.

This week John Oliver did a show on assisted living facilities, which is the politically correct name for a human torture system which is defined as legal under every penal code there is, federal, state, municipal or county. It’s a fucking nightmare with four walls where people go to die.

I spent time in a nursing “facility” after having bypass surgery during which complications led the doctors to put me into a coma for two weeks. I lost 30 pounds and was weak enough to get sent to a place called Lorien Nursing Home and I spent a week there having physical therapy and being served food unfit for most animals.

In the room with me was an elderly Japanese man whose English vocabulary was “Pee pee!” And was a plea to be assisted to the toilet. Sometimes he was responded to quickly. Sometimes not. Sometimes not at all.

When they left him like that of course he’d urinate on himself and his bed. The nurse would give him hell, bitching at him as if he could understand her. He could not. Unable to help, I had to listen to this shit and there was, I knew very well, nobody I could complain to on his behalf.

If not for March Madness, I’d have gone mad myself. The doctor doing my follow up care was one of the cruelest, crudest, most foul physicians I can ever remember seeing, and that is saying something because in my life I’ve been to emergency rooms in Baltimore City and County, Anne Arundel County, Howard County and Carroll County. The full list of hospitals contained in my visits are more than you’d think. I may be a couple of years shy of being a senior, but you can take this to the bank: my odometer has turned about 4 times. And this twat was the worst of all the doctors who ever operated on me, stitched me up, set broken bones or treated smashed fingers, burns, or heart attacks. In a nursing home, this guy practiced medicine with the bedside manner of Joseph Mengele. I hated him. Forgiving him doesn’t even come into play.

The nurses were negligent. All of the ones I saw, at least. So that’s one week in the life of a patient who is never going back. Imagine living there for the rest of your life.

Hell has nothing on a nursing home.

Any “resident” who dies and goes to Hades would be getting a reprieve.

I’ve heard and read about nursing home abuse all my life. Its very nature makes the typical account fodder for a Stephen King novel.

Before my mother got married, she was a registered nurse. My controlling father would have no part of a working wife. He kept her pregnant from 1958 to 1970.

As we were gathering together to go to the police to give written statements, one younger sibling told me that one day, when my youngest brother, the last of us to be born, was still in a crib, she had seen mother bend over and fellate him.

You can’t get much sicker than that, and I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried. But then, around that same time, I mean when we were preparing to go to the police, I learned that mother had entered the job market as a nurse once more.

At a Glen Burnie nursing home. A picture of her giving helpless old men fellatio immediately came to mind and made me sick. Sure she would do it. Of course she would. She was sick. So goddamn sick that she’s still a monster for the ages.

She was never unique, though.

Back when the trial was in session I still thought my family was different. That all eight children sexually abused, beaten and mentally abused was some kind of aberration rarely seen.

But that’s not true. It happens to families all over the world and it always has and it always will.

But I digress. Picturing her loose in a nursing home caused me to remember every horror story I knew about nursing homes. You want to see a real shit show? Go visit the inmates of one of those places after COVID-19. Which won’t be for some time.

What you’ll hear, smell and see will change you. Not for the better.

In the UK a particularly sickening nursing home homicide made these headlines. Once you click the link, a photo of a blonde woman will be the first thing you see.

You are looking at a monster.

That’s what I said, a monster.

Not some post-modern Prometheus born or sewn together in a laboratory or darkened castle. No, just an ordinary-looking young woman who happened to, without remorse, torture a woman to death in a nursing home. The abuse is documented; the case closed. Justice…has been served.

Except that justice doesn’t mean any more in the UK than it does in America. The defendant pled guilty. Guilty!

She won’t spend a day in prison. Know why? She pleaded her belly. She’s pregnant with a five-year-old at home. The judge had to consider this and let her go home. I understand it, but there is a problem with this solution.

First, any remorse she displayed was because she got arrested, not because the woman she tormented actually died. Second, she’s clearly abusive to an extraordinarily gruesome degree. Don’t you wonder what that means for her children? When she’s texting, and they misbehave, interrupting her, what will she do? Beat them? Scream that Hell is coming for them? Poke them in their eyes?

Because abusive behavior comes from several places, chief among them being frightening anger, uncontrollable and furious. It also comes from a lack of patience and a lack of control. Abusers, like rapists and serial killers, need to feel power and control over others. We know that much despite not really understanding it. Sometimes, if diagnosed and treated with talk and drug therapy, who knows how many were prevented from causing harm. And yes, once the right mix is “dialed in”, drug therapy is a miracle. Years ago, in other parts of the world, rapists were given complete castration, becoming less than eunuchs. Know what happened? They repeat offended and used objects for penetration. Rape was never sexual. Power, humiliation and control. That’s what it’s about. Just like my parents. They’re all different but all the same.

Abuse isn’t limited to sexual violations. In nursing homes, people die from infections which fester in bedsores and maybe that could have happened anyway, but in there, nurses just don’t bother to turn their patients. That’s another shitty, horrific way to die.

And don’t be defensive; no need for that. I know some facilities really do keep higher standards and provide better care, but most of those are expensive and beyond the means of the bigger part of the elderly and disabled population. And nurses are not as a rule monsters. Health care workers are usually entering a field they feel strongly about. They take jobs with the best of intentions and are motivated. A large portion burn out, leaving the field of healthcare forever because they’ve seen too much, put in too many hours for too little pay, and they just give up.

What replaces them are people attracted to the job not because of the pay, of course. They’re drawn to a job where they expect low standards to allow them to get by because prior experience tells them they aren’t very good at healthcare. I’ve seen workers come to the mental healthcare field because they themselves are having problems mentally and emotionally and they reason, wrongly, that they’ll “fit in”. They don’t. One ward I was on in my crisis had more adult thumb suckers in one place than any I’ve ever seen, and they were all employees.

I used to believe that American health care was cutting edge, the best in all the world. People from other countries came here for treatment, some right here in Maryland at Johns Hopkins or University Hospital. Now universities in other countries are warning their students abroad to leave the United States because of subpar health systems.

Here’s the reason, though, that I’m writing this post: when I can no longer care for myself, I will not go to a nursing home. With my fading strength, I go out my own way, on my own terms, with dignity and honor.

Terminal patients should have the right to choose to end their lives before the indignity and pain reduces them to nothing more than a screaming bunch of dying nerve endings. Before someone leaves them in a urine-soaked bed or punches them or screams “Fuck you!” At them.

Because that’s no way to be treated. It’s no way to live and certainly no way to die.

One more thing. It’s important.

I’m proud to have lived my life as an American citizen. To have served this country. To have overcome great trauma enough to have worked for 30 years. To have overcome a racist upbringing. I’m proud to have served under three presidents.

I am not proud of a lot more, though, than I am proud of. I failed so many things. I failed my children. My wife. My faith. I have tried to keep fighting, to be strong. To be honorable. When that is no longer possible I will not allow anyone to take away my dignity, my honor. I will never allow that. I close by saying to you, I don’t know much. I’m not a very smart man. But I do know that we are all on borrowed time. Not with our personal mortality; death is a natural part of life.

But we are not a civilized species. And all our technological advances and equations and theories can’t hide what savages we really are. When the Ever Giving was stranded in the Suez Canal, it caused a backup in shipping traffic that could take 9 months to correct. Prices and demand will again rise, because COVID-19 taught us nothing. We never changed to allow for extra supplies to be stocked. We didn’t learn. And should anything else compound the Suez aftermath, you’ll see global shortages for months on products essential and non-essential alike. We aren’t ready for that. It could be an epic disaster rivaling COVID.

And that’s only one thing. Climate change deniers have caused delays in an already hopeless battle. It is only early spring here in the States, and already the lawn mowers, leaf blowers and weed eaters are constantly running. That shouldn’t be happening. Temperature rise has given superfungi and other dangerous life the chance to mutate. Fungi once harmless to humans have adapted to survive body temperatures and can kill. Supplies of coffee, bananas and cocoa are already endangered. That’s just to name a few.

At the very bottom of the Mariana Trench, wildlife is already eating plastic. Yet most plastics still cannot be recycled. If every plastic item we’ve ever made is still in existence as some experts warn, and too many restrictions on recycling continue, we’re doomed.

Deforestation continues unabated, causing species extinction daily. Loss of habitat due to us building homes most people can’t afford is the height of stupidity and short sightedness and greed. But we’re not finished yet. When people wake up, it will be too late. That isn’t very far off, either.

As I was writing this I heard of another school shooting. We are savages. Mad, quite mad. Brutal. With crooked men defending the continued proliferation of guns everywhere.

But what do you expect? When we allow people who torture our elderly to death in nursing homes to go free, we’ve already proven just how brutal we are. That…will not change.

John Oliver’s take: