While I was a contractor working in another country, my sisters were our mother’s care managers at home. First my middle sister was in charge and then my younger sister became the manager of her nursing home at the end of mom’s life. I realize that I was absent from my mother’s care for almost nine years. When I finally got back home, I saw more of my mom and my younger sister continued to be Administrator. She seemed to be doing a good job, so I didn’t disagree with her decisions regarding my mother. There is a lot of paperwork involved including bills and taxes etc. I only got involved when I found out that Mom’s insurance company was thinking of canceling her coverage since she was now in her nineties. Insurance companies never like to pay. Upon researching her payment history, I discovered that Mom had made continuous monthly payments for almost 15 years. The insurance company had made thousands of money thanks to Mom, who only had one leg, and now they canceled her policy and only gave her back about two hundred of those dollars. I immediately wrote letters and made many phone calls and finally got back a considerable part of the money she had paid. I literally had to shame them into giving some of the money back. This money helped pay for her burial expenses when it was time to leave.

Little did I realize that he would get sick shortly after I returned home from Iraq? My mom contracted pneumonia inside a nursing home from another nursing home patient with the disease. This other lady with pneumonia was allowed to walk freely from her room to the nursing home cafeteria. She sat next to my mom at the table and she had this disease that mom didn’t need to get. Why was this other lady not fed in her room away from the other patients? Do these things happen in other nursing facilities? I think the nursing home should know better. That was wrong.

Then my mom was allowed to stay in her room at the nursing home for almost three days with that illness before she was transferred to a small hospital nearby. Once in the hospital my sister told me and she told me to come to the hospital because my mother was dying. How could someone be dying of pneumonia? Today there are medicines. I couldn’t understand what was happening at the time. When I got to the hospital, I was surprised that my mother had no feeding tubes or medication machines attached to her. I couldn’t understand why this was so and I got angry with my sister, who was the legal administrator of my mother’s care.

Why was mom not getting proper care? My sister told me that mom had signed papers saying she didn’t want any machine to keep her alive. She signed this paper with my sister’s approval in front of a social worker. I immediately went to the hospital reception with my son and demanded that the hospital put in feeding tubes and give my mother the proper medication. They refused to help me because my sister was the administrator and they only listened to her. I told them that I was her only child and that she wanted some service. All my sisters who are supposedly religious said that they agreed to go with my younger sister and that it was my mother’s wishes.

The head nurse told me to calm down or the police would be called. She asked me if this was America and how elderly patients were treated today. My mom was 93 and only had one leg but she was sane and had a strong heart and lungs and it didn’t seem right that she had to die because of hospital policy and three sisters who didn’t care what I thought and stubbornly went ahead with Administrator’s wishes. Mom never wanted to die. She knew it. The hospital just needed to cure my mother of pneumonia. She was wondering if hospitals don’t try to save patients in their nineties. It seemed very bad to me. I considered getting a court order to withdraw my sister’s administrative rights, but I knew there was no time to lose. My sisters and her daughters stayed in Mom’s hospital room and literally watched her starve to death and then suffer miserably. I was very upset with her actions and attitudes. My sisters acted like they cared. After my mom’s horrible death, I haven’t spoken to them for almost two years. Do any of you have similar stories to tell about a brother who had admin rights that went against what he thought was correct?