Health: A Long-Term Tragedy
This article originally appeared in The Local. Read the full version here.
Cathy Parkes never intended to put her father, Paul Parkes, in a long-term-care home. The very notion of confinement ran contrary to Paul’s nature. He was a consummate outdoorsman—a fisherman and hunter who seemed to be on intimate terms with the troposphere. He could glance at the sky and spot the precise moment when the wispy cirrus clouds above him started to congeal, portending rain. During childhood, Cathy and her two brothers often went on camping trips with their father. “Once, in Killarney, we docked at an island with a mountain covered in blueberry bushes,” she recalls. “Dad said, ‘I’m not getting out of the canoe. A storm’s coming.’” The sun was beating down, and Paul’s prediction seemed outlandish. But he was right. “As soon as we reached the top of the mountain,” Cathy says, “a wicked storm broke out.” She and her brothers dashed to the base, where Paul was waiting in the canoe to ferry them back to the campsite.
When Cathy was a child, she couldn’t imagine that such a man would one-day find himself weakened, immobile, and confined to a tiny room. But in 2016, at age 82, Paul fell while gardening and was unable to get up. His wife found him an hour later keeled over by a flower bed in their Oshawa backyard. He was later diagnosed with hydrocephalus, a condition whereby fluid builds up beneath the skull, damaging the brain and causing mobility issues, memory loss, and urinary incontinence. Paul’s wife was experiencing cognitive decline and could offer only limited support. In 2018, Paul moved to Pickering, down the street from his daughter. For eighteen months, she was his primary caregiver. “Dad was losing his mobility,” Cathy says. “And I was hurting myself trying to lift him.” As his condition worsened, she forced herself to confront a painful fact: Paul needed more help than she could give.
Cathy knew that long-term-care facilities—or nursing homes, as they’re often called—have a bad reputation in Canada. In the 2000s, her grandmother had been abused and beaten in a nursing home. She also knew that there was nowhere else her dad could go. She contacted her Local Health Integration Network, the regional organization that administers placements, and was advised to submit a list of preferred facilities. Her first and second choices had near-decade-long wait lists, so she settled on a place Paul could get into: Orchard Villa, a 233-bed facility operated by Southbridge Care Homes, a for-profit company. The place was far from charming—she took an online tour and concluded that it resembled “a sad, run-down hospital”—but at least it was nearby. Also, Patricia Watson—Cathy’s mother and Paul’s ex-wife, with whom he was friendly—volunteered at the centre regularly and could look out for his well-being.
In early November, Paul moved into Orchard Villa, which was even more depressing than Cathy had expected. The floors were filthy, the windows were so grimy you could barely see through them, and, in parts of the building, the smell of excrement was so overwhelming it made her want to retch. To monitor patients, staff would leave them in the hallways within sight of the nurses. Whenever she passed a nursing station, Cathy saw crowds of ten or fifteen wheelchair-bound residents, some asleep, some calling for help, some staring listlessly at the walls. “I felt terrible leaving him there,” she says.
In time, though, she convinced herself that she and her father had reason to feel lucky. The staff at Orchard Villa were clearly overworked, but many seemed genuinely concerned about Paul’s well-being. Paul made instant friends with Milton, his eighty-year-old roommate, with whom he had lively debates about the Bible. Milton, a Methodist, preferred the more uplifting passages in the Gospels, whereas Paul, a Pentecostalist, adored the Book of Revelations, the apocalyptic final chapter of the New Testament, with its deadly thunder and annihilating hail storms. The duo would spend hours together watching Paul’s favourite channel, the Weather Network, each man lying in his separate bed and staring at his own TV.
They watched the news too, which in January became increasingly preoccupied with COVID-19. The crisis seemed far away, but like a hurricane that swells up on one side of the planet only to make landfall nearby mere days later, the virus travelled quickly. Orchard Villa saw its first case in early spring, and by the end of summer, 70 residents had died, a mortality rate of 30 percent. Cathy got her first indication that something was terribly wrong at the home on April 9, during a phone call with her father. “I need you to get me out of here,” he told her.
This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.