This article is to warn and educate you about the unfortunate abuse and neglect of the elderly that can happen in nursing homes. A large amount of the people that live in nursing homes are as helpless as children. Now, when a person is arrested for the abuse of an elderly person, it is looked at by the law as the same thing as abusing a child. That is at least a step in the right direction.

The majority of nursing homes are filled with caring and compassionate people who are devoted to both their jobs and the patients they care for. Unfortunately, there are a few out there that don't have the best interests of their patients in mind. Those are the ones I want to address, so you will know what to look for and how to check out a nursing home and their employees, before you entrust them to care for your loved one. Our family found out the hard way what can happen when you don't.

I grew up with my mother suffering from bipolar disease. Back then, the doctors not only didn't understand the disease, they didn't have the correct medication to treat it like they do now. It was difficult for all of us, because of the highs and lows, suicide attempts, and erratic behavior she would show at times. Other times she would be fine for periods of time. We had no idea what was going on until much later, when bipolar disease became more understood, and medications were developed to help with the mood swings. Thank God for medical advances, since this can be an inherited disease, and I am on medication myself, as is my sister. Anyway, as time went on, mother had what the doctors called a "psychotic break". She ended up in a state mental hospital, where she stayed for 10 long years. We were told she had dementia, Alzheimer's, paranoid schizophrenia, and a whole host of other mental disorders that seemed to change every week. More about that later. Every time her diagnosis would change, so did her medication. Each time this happened, her behavior would change. Sometimes she was very out of it, sometimes very lucid, other times almost catatonic, etc. After about 10 years, the doctors decided that she needed to be moved to a nursing home.

My sister had become my mother's guardian by this time, but she always discussed with me any changes that were made concerning our mother. She had told me about mother needing to be moved to a nursing home and my sister had gone and found one she thought would be suitable. To say it was a bad decision would be an understatement, but I want to expressley say that I am not blaming my sister in any way. I want that known up front. But the front the nursing home put up, and the real truth of what was going on behind the scenes were two different things.

We began to suspect something was amiss when our mother's health began to decline. We saw her go from someone who was physically healthy and speaking, to someone who would not speak, and seemed so over medicated that she would rarely leave her bed. Then she started to act as though she was scared of something, and would not leave her room. We were so uneducated about her condition, and had been told so many different diagnosis, as well as living with her erratic behavior as we were growing up that we really didn't pay as much attention to the red flags that were present as we should have. I will always feel guilty for that. I feel that I let her down and failed to protect her when she was most vulnerable. Everything blew wide open in November of 2008, on the same day we had gathered as a family at my sister's house to have Thanksgiving dinner.

When I arrived at my sister's house that day, I could tell something was wrong with her. I kept asking her what the problem was, and she kept telling me nothing, then said she would tell me later. Finally, she took me in her bathroom, shut the door, and said, "You have to promise me that if I tell you this, you will not get hysterical, and please don't say anything to anyone else today. Promise me you won't fall apart". Alarms were going off in my head like crazy, and I can remember my mind racing, doing a mental inventory of my family, who were all there, trying to figure out what could possibly have happened that was so awful that she had to mentally prepare me for some type of obviously awful news. Just as the thought of my mother, who was in the nursing home, entered my mind, my sister told me the absolutely sickening, horrendous truth. While we had all slept peacefully the night before, not knowing anything was amiss, our poor, defenseless mother HAD BEEN RAPED!!! Plus, she had been taken to the hospital, where they had examined her and done a rape kit on her to check for DNA, all without our knowledge. The nursing home had not even called my sister, who was my mother's legal guardian, until the next morning, the very same morning we were all gathered to celebrate Thanksgiving.

My knees literally buckled, and I felt like the wind had been sucked out of my body. How could this even be possible? What kind of vile, horrible, soulless predator had done this horrible, sickening thing to our almost childlike mother, who weighed less than 100 lbs. and was totally unable to protect herself? Well, as my sister went on, she told me that a female employee of the nursing home had let her boyfriend into the nursing home, through a locked door. This "boyfriend" was a former employee of the nursing home, but had been fired for "some reason". The story we were told, by a male nurse that had literally caught the man in the act, was that the "boyfriend" was supposedly going around the nursing home, gathering up dirty laundry, to help out his girlfriend. While he was in our mother's room, in her bed, this male nurse, who was a good man, had walked in and caught this vile creature in our mother's bed, raping her. what had caught his attention was the fact that the door to our mother's room had been closed. He actually cared about our mother, and had opened the door to check on her and caught this man committing this horrible crime. The "boyfriend" had jumped out of our mother's bed and stammered something stupid about how he was just "looking for dirty socks" all while he had his pants around his ankles, basically. The nice male nurse immediately called the police, and this horrible man was arrested at the nursing home and was in jail by the time we found out anything had even happened. By the way, the "girlfriend" who had let him in originally, after hours, which was illegal in itself, was never convicted of any charges.

The rest of the day was a blur for me. We went through the actions of having Thanksgiving, and did not tell our family until the next day, because we wanted to find out the whole story before we told them. We found out that the man was in his 40's, had a long rap sheet of other priors, and that he was actually an ex-employee of the nursing home. They had hired a criminal to work with these poor, defenseless people on a daily basis! We still have no idea if this was an isolated event or if it had happened multiple times to our mother or other female patients. We knew she had become very fearful, and had developed an odd fear of her closet. The door had to stay open at all times or she became very anxious, so we believe that he must have hidden in her closet more than once, just lying in wait like the predator that he is, waiting for the perfect time to pounce. I am getting physically ill just writing this, and it has been 11 years since it happened. I can't begin to describe to anyone the guilt we all feel, as a family unit. We feel as though we failed to protect our mother in some way when she needed us the most. We have second guessed ourselves so many times for possibly overlooking warning signs. It just never entered our minds that something like this could possibly happen in a place that you have entrusted your loved one to be taken care of in their later years, when the time has passed where you can no longer care for them at home, and they have had to give up the human dignity of being able to live an independent and free life. It's not like we just stuck her in the first nursing home that we drove by. My sister had gotten a referral for this place, if I remember correctly, from the state hospital where mother had been for so long. It was in the DFW area, close to my sister, so she could be close by. My neices would go and visit her also. One of my nieces had started coming to us telling us things just didn't seem right, and other things, but we seriously thought she just didn't understand the progression of the diseases we had been told mother had, and was having a hard time accepting and dealing with the fact that her grandmother was so ill, and we didn't pay enough attention to her. God, do I wish one of us had have given paid more attention to the things she was telling us....

So, the sad and awful truth settled in, and we went the next business day to the nursing home, with a private investigator, both to talk to the administrator and to check on our mother. When we showed up, obviously NOT in a good mood with things (a severe understatement), the administrator and several of the nurses and other administration were ready for us - they thought...We kept our cool, asked alot of questions and took alot of notes for the lawyer we had already obtained, and they handled us with total kid gloves. They didn't know that the man with us was a private investigator. After that, mother was moved to the town where I live, which is a lot smaller, and we had a nursing home here where other family members had been, and we immediately moved her to the new one. That way, I could visit every day if need be, and was close by if anything unusual happened. We made the new nursing home aware of all the situation that had happened so she could be cared for properly. One of the big problems was that the man who had raped her was a different ethnicity than our mother, and not only was she fearful of men in general, she was especially scared of this particular ethnic group of men. So they had to keep any of their male employees she showed fear of off of her wing of the home. But I will say they worked with us very closely to try to help mother feel as secure as possible, but she was very traumatized, and although she had been over-medicated at the old nursing home, she unfortunately remembered what had happened to her there. So she had extreme anxiety and as a rape victim myself, she probably had post traumatic stress disorder.

Well, Kenneth Carey, the perpetrator of the crime had his day in court, and my sister and I were there to represent our mother. He had been going to plead not guilty and try a jury trial, until he found out they had done a DNA test, and he quickly changed his plea and pled guilty and plea bargained for a lesser sentence. Here is what really gets my blood boiling. We were told that legally, a person's room in a nursing home is considered the same as being their "home". So, since he had entered her room like he had, he could have also been facing breaking and entering charges along with the rape charge. These two together would have given him about 25 years to serve. Instead, the ADA let him plea bargain by pleading guilty to rape, and they dropped the breaking and entering charges, all without even consulting us! We did not find all this out until after the court appearance and sentencing, and they should not have ever told me, because I got a bit vocal about the justice system and my sister had to drag me out of there. For the rape, he was sentenced to 10 years. He got out of jail in 2008, and our mother passed away in 2007. He is now free and our poor, beloved mother is dead and gone....He is a registered sex offender in Tarrant County, I believe. He did have to serve the whole 10 years, we made sure of that by writing letters every time he came up for parole.

I don't quite think justice was served in this case. Of course I am a bit biased and honestly, a bit bitter. Later, after we sued the nursing home in our mother's behalf, we found out that 26 other families filed suits against them right after. We don't know what the suits were for, but I pray it wasn't for the same thing. We shut down their whole chain of about 13 nursing homes. My fear is that they somehow just changed names, moved on down the road, opened back up and are back in business somewhere. I pray that has not happened, for everyone's sake. I still cannot believe that the person who let him in that building, late at night, after hours, did not face charges herself. It just boggles my mind.

So - This is the majority of our story. Like I said, not all nursing homes are bad, but you need to be very selective when choosing the right one for your loved one. Below are a few tips to help you, as well as to help you think of other things you might want to watch for or do when searching for the right home.

1. Make a list of all the questions you want to ask before you ever go. Things like, "Do you run background checks on ALL of your employees before hiring them? "Have you ever had any problems in the past of any kind, either with an employ or the state"?(these answers can be found by calling the Better Business Bureau, and the State Board of Health, along with other government agencies that deal with nursing homes.
2. Inspect the entire nursing home, including the kitchen, to see if it is kept clean, etc. See if the home smells and looks dirty and ill-kept, or smells nice and clean.
3. Pop in for visits and watch the interaction between employees and the patients, listen to how the employees talk to them and treat them and even talk to other patients family members if you get the chance, so you can get some feedback and their opinions.
4. Ask administration how they handle clothing coming up missing, or other valuables, as we had A LOT of our mother's nicer clothing disappear. Someone was stealing it.
5. Most importantly, ask them point blank what type of policy do they have in place for alerting the family in case of any sudden accidents, illnesses, emergencies, etc. Try to get something in writing that you can look over and read.
6. Find out if they have entertainment or some type of interactive activities for the patients that are able to participate, other than a stupid television being on all the time and that is it.
7. Find out who the staff doctors are and check them out on the internet or through the American Medical Association (AMA)
8. Make sure they notify the legal guardian if there are any medication changes. You also have the right to see the medication charts if you are the legal guardian. Many people don't know this.

If I think of any other helpful tips, I will edit this article and republish it, to try and help you protect your loved one as much as possible. We need to love and cherish our parents and grandparents as they age. They become like children eventually, and we owe it to them, as they protected us when we were children. Besides, the pain of what CAN happen if you aren't diligent enough is too much to bear, both for the family, but most importantly, for the patient in their care. They are still human and still have rights and deserve to be treated with caring and dignity. Bless all of you who are struggling with this right now. I welcome any comments and stories you might want to share.

Thank you for reading about my mother's tragedy. I just hope that something good can come from this awful thing that happened, and by reading this, it just might save or protect another person from suffering the indignities she had to go through.