Tales from the Nursing Home

Okay! Every place of employment has it's share of crazy people but for some reason, our nursing home seems to have an abundance of craziness! Not the residents, you see, even though many have dementing diagnoses. Rather, it's the crazy family members that seem to make our day interesting. Take "Joana", for instance. This seemingly normal woman arrived one day interested in admitting her mother. She toured the facility, completed the application and we began the process of admissions.

Shortly after this resident was admitted, things started to seem a little "strange" about this daughter so we "Googled" her. Turns out she had a website listing herself as an "astrologer" and some kind of natural food chef with a "wellness" B&B on the side. Okayyy. It gets better.

Within a week of this precious elderly lady being admitted, her four children began arriving almost daily with lawyers, bankers and such! Turns out, these kids have been fighting over their mother's money for years and the fight continued in our facility! We were then visited by an attorney representing herself as the resident's guardian ad litem since the kids were all fighting over "custody" of mom and her money. Thankfully, none of the kids were awarded guardianship and another attorney was appointed to protect this poor woman from her greedy, and a little crazy, children.

Since that time (almost a year ago), daughter "Joana" began a downward spiral into craziness. She started arriving at all hours of the night to "visit" her mother, usually during meal times and we noted she was dining on mom's dinner! One night, she scared the crap out of the nurse on duty as she was found sleeping in the hospital bed with her mother at 3:00 am! The guardian had to put boundaries on her visits, limit her questions of the staff (because we didn't want to put mom on all of her crazy vitamins and supplements), and generally try to control this daughter's behavior. THEN the daughter went back to court in an attempt to re-gain guardianship of mom and her money! Again, she lost, thankfully.

Her next move was to arrive in the nursing home with the police in order to collect her "personal belongings". Now, maybe I'm the crazy one, but you'd think anything she brought in to be in her mother's room would belong to her mother. Well, we knew what was coming next. Within two weeks of her last visit (the guardian had to finally ban her from the building), the State showed up on a complaint (from "Joana") then the crazy bitch actually reported me to the Board of Nursing by stating we were "withholding treatment" from her mother. What is key here, is that her mother had been hospitalized a couple of months before and was referred to Hospice as she was declining cognitively, her COPD was much worse and her poor heart was barely functioning.

Next up: she started sending random men in to "visit" her mother and those men would bring "special pudding" that "Joana" had made for her mother! Needless to say, had to put a stop to that right away! Guardian had to ban all visitors except for this woman's children (except for "Crazy Joana").

With all that nursing home staff have to deal with, families like this are more prevalent than you'd imagine. I have no idea how people like "Joana" function in the "real world" considering how totally crazy they are in our setting. Just another day at work!