r/nursinghome

My wife has been in the nursing home, technically in rehab, for six months after having some strokes. She had plateaued and had lost most of her services (but apparently not speech). So, over the weekend, my wife's sister-in-law (who thinks she knows better than the doctors and the nursing home and me and everyone) was visiting her, thought she looked poorly, and demanded that the nursing home take wife to the emergency room.

Wife is now in the hospital. Unclear what is actually wrong with her or if she actually needs to be in the hospital. She is having trouble swallowing so they put in a feeding tube, but she had some swallowing issues at the nursing home which is why they put her on pureed foods. But otherwise, unclear if she even needs to be in the hospital at this time. However, they are keeping her there for a few days while they do a swallowing study and find out what is wrong with her (besides the things that were already wrong with her from her strokes - not being able to walk, difficulty talking, etc).

Anyway, I'm concerned that the nursing home is going to give away wife's bed while she is in the hospital. Do they normally hold onto it for people who have to be hospitalized for a few days?

UPDATE: I asked the nursing home for their bed-hold policy and they said that they don't hold beds at all. However, they said they probably will have enough vacancy to take my wife back when she gets out of the nursing home.

I'm concerned because my wife's sisters, who got her to sign over healthcare proxy and power of attorney to them, would like nothing more than to dump her back at the house and make me take care of her. They don't like the nursing home and they really have been looking for an excuse to get wife out of there and dump her on my couch where the children and I would have to take care of her 24/7. I think this, likely unnecessary, hospital visit is their way of getting her to lose her bed at the nursing home so they can dump her here.

Wife's condition was not great before the strokes she had in February. For a couple of years, she was living on the couch, not taking her medicines, not bathing, not eating, pooping / peeing on the floor, and leaving garbage all over the place. This was not good for the children but we couldn't do anything about it. Now that she is in nursing home care, the children can have a safe environment. Her sisters would like her to go back to living that way, rather than staying in a nursing home, because they think she belongs at home and they want me to be forced to take care of her.

Let’s talk about it. I work at a nursing home and I would rather d!e than get put in one when I’m older. I don’t like it at all. I love my job and I love my residents so much but nursing homes give me the ick. I don’t feel like management and health insurance care about these people enough and I don’t feel like 1 CNA should have as many patients as we do because I want to spend more 1 on 1 time with these people and not be rushed by physical therapy to get them up, not be rushed bc dr appts on tops of having to change 12+ people every 2 hours, shower half of them and make sure everyone is okay and getting them up and down for breakfast and lunch and dinner. It’s too much for one person to do all of this with 12+ residents and give them all adequate patient care. 😑 why are we as CNA’s or even nurses allowing this??

So my wife (early 50s) has been in a nursing home since February when she suffered five strokes, fell, and could not get up. She went to a nursing home for rehab, but her situation did not improve enough. After five months there, she could talk (but not well and she usually doesn't want to talk), she couldn't walk, couldn't transfer herself to the wheelchair, couldn't bathe herself, etc.

The nursing home took away her physical therapy and speech therapy, saying that she had plateaued. She wasn't making much progress and she is mentally distracted a lot, staring off into space, staring at her phone, doing anything but paying attention to what's in front of her.

To be fair, this is what wife was like at home for the last year or two of her life. She spent 99% of her time lying on the couch, did not take her meds, did not eat regular meals (but munched junk food), smoked / vaped in secret, and did not shower for months at a time. The entire house smelled of her body odor and her young kids and I were not at all happy with her behavior or what she had done to the house.

Anyway, she is at a plateau at her current nursing home. They no longer give her services and she is basically warehoused there. They feed her, medicate her, bathe her, and toilet her but she doesn't do much with her life, even though she is mentally at least partially competent. It's not a great situation for her, but it is a better situation for the kids than when she was at home.

Now, they visit her a couple of times a week at the nursing home and she all but ignores them. She stares at her phone and the TV while they lie in the bed with her. She hardly interacts.

Her sister, who blames me for wife's condition, wants to move her to a different nursing home, with the idea that another place will try the physical therapy again and, this time, get through to her. I'm concerned that another place would be more eager to release her and she could end up back here on the couch again, perhaps able to take herself to the bathroom but nothing else. Wife qualified for Medicaid so we are allowed to move her to any other Medicaid-taking nursing home, provided they have a bed and are willing to take her.

Should we move her? Would another place get her out sooner? Is that even a good idea? At what point do you tell someone "you belong at the nursing home long term?"

My wife isn't on Reddit herself, so she asked me to ask the community at large.

She is working for a nursing home in their memory care unit and has had some serious concerns about staffing and management behaviours. She doesn't have a CRN, RN, or any other nursing accreditation, and was literally thrown to the deep end, solo, on her first day. (She complained LOUDLY and got training after the first week, but was completely left to fend for herself for the first week. The person who was *supposed* to have been training her was sacked, apparently they had been a problem for a while?) This is after an interview where she openly stated she didn't have prior experience with in-patient care, she had done some assisted in-home-living work but nothing in-patient style.

The home where she is working seems to be having serious turnover issues as well, scarcely a week passes where she doesn't mention someone else having quit or her boss calling her on her days off asking her to cover for someone else who called in or no-call-no-showed. She has managed to get off-shift at the correct time something like six or seven times in the past three months, her relief comes in *exactly* on the clock or five to ten minutes late consistently, which means that turnover holds my wife for an additional twenty to thirty minutes past the end of her shift. Which her management complains to HER about being long on the shift, with no apparent behaviour changes or consequences for the relief crew.

She is covering 20 patients solo, admittedly on the graveyard shift, all of whom are late-stage Alzheimer's or similar and she reports that between five and ten patients are active at any given time, and basically all of them are fully incapable of self-maintenance (adult diapers, incontinence, difficulty moving around, etc.), and she is having to handle all of them simultaneously.

So, with the background out of the way... Is this in any way normal? She enjoys helping people, she found the work fulfilling after the initial panic inducing week, and quite frankly we really need the second income stream so she is hesitant to consider tendering her resignation unless she has an immediate replacement position somewhere, but she also doesn't want to jump from one frying pan into another boiling pot either, to strain a metaphor. Is this the norm, or is she simply in a bad site?

Every professor acts like ending up in a nursing home is a career failure. We spend weeks on pediatrics but barely touch on gerontology. Why is long-term care so stigmatized in academia?