Conference News & Views

Dear Governor Bredesen,

My name is Chuck Lister and I’m writing on behalf of my Mother. I want to let you know that she (and I) are now facing a very serious situation due to the Tennessee Department of Health’s actions toward McKendree Village in Hermitage, TN.

Please allow me to give you some background leading up to this situation. In June of 1995 my Mother was stricken with viral encephalitis...only 2 years after retiring from years of dedicated work for the Red Cross and Eastman Chemical. At that point in time, she lived in her own home in Kingsport, TN. This illness or virus attacked the temporal lobes of her brain and she went into a coma for 2 weeks. When she finally awoke, we found that much of her long term memory was kind of a confused mess or completely gone. Also, emotions were confused and short term memory was maybe 15 seconds at best.

I can’t explain well enough with my poor writing skills the total emotional upheaval I felt. Doctors could not diagnose with complete confidence what the future would hold for her, but told me her chance of recovery was likely very slim at best. So we (I, my wife, and some family members) began trying to figure out a way to care for my Mom.

This is a brief summary of that history:
.1st two years…we paid caregiver type people to live with her at home in Kingsport. Finally, we had to come to terms with the fact that it was not likely that she would ever get better enough to ever regain her prior life and independence.
.Approx 1997, we moved her to Nashville where she lived with my sister during the week and with me and my wife on the weekends. After about 6 or 8 weeks, we realized this too was not going to work well as a long term solution for her care.
.So I took her to the Parthenon Pavilion and they helped evaluate her needs. Finally, they told me clearly that she needed 24 hour supervision in a secure or “locked” environment.

Over the next 8 or so years my wife and I made arrangements for her to live at the following places:

XXXXXXX Health Care in Nashville. My Mother stayed there until all of her money was gone. Since it is private pay only, I had to move her.

Metro Bordeaux Alzheimer’s Unit…she lived there for about 2 or 3 years. Then a friend told me about a place closer to my home in Antioch where her Mother stayed. So I decided to move her.

XXXXXXXXXXX Health Care…she lived at this place also for about 2 years. And it was while she lived at XXXXXXXXXX that we began to fully understand the differences in care that a person can receive. We had the normal everyday type issues…she sometimes was not properly dressed, they couldn’t find her shoes, etc. But since the place was only about 5 miles from my home, we just kept battling those relatively mundane issues with the hope of making the place better for her and others as well. Then we had some major issues:

• In the late summer of 2001, I received a call at ~ 10:30 PM. My Mother was at the Southern Hills Hospital emergency room. She had been found lying in a ditch near XXXXX Nursing Home. She was badly scratched, bruised, and battered. One eye was blackened and swollen shut…apparently she had fallen on her face. Since XXXXX did not even know she was gone when the police found her, she could have easily been run over and killed by someone in a car…we were very lucky to have had that policeman’s help.
  
  After that, XXXXX put some countermeasures in place to ensure the residents could not elope by locking the doors and stationing a person at the entrance 24 hours per day.
  
• Then another issue came…they allowed a dentist to see her and gave them permission to pull a tooth…without any notice or communication to me! When I visited her, the tooth was gone. After raising the issue and investigating, we found the Administrator had signed off on the approval form. This was completely against the rules and he was subsequently fired.
  
• Then she was somehow allowed to walk out the front door again. This time she was found at the local Mapco several blocks away.
  
  At this point, we knew we had to give up on XXXXXXXXX and move her to a better facility.

XXXXXXXXXX in Smyrna…she lived there for about a 2 year period.

Then around June 2005 I was notified that McKendree Village had an opening…we had been on their waiting list for about 7 years! And honestly at this point, I was in a quandary as to what would be the best for my Mother…move her again or continue staying at XXXXXXX where we were not having any issues worthy of mentioning.

My wife and I thought about this as intensely as possible. And finally, we decided that we believed McKendree would be the best for her long term care even if it meant another move and the upsetting of her normal routine…at least as much as she could have of a routine. So we took the risk and moved her again.

Now I must tell you something very important…that is absolutely one of the BEST decisions we ever made for her. The care she has received, the resources made available for her, the overall experience there --everything is so completely unmatched by any other facility that there is no way to compare them to McKendree. I firmly believe and have witnessed that McKendree Village is at an entirely higher level than the others. Honestly speaking, we should use McKendree as a benchmark to compare others as a way to heighten the performance of the healthcare system overall.

Finally, I know you can’t feel my emotion with these few words. But I hope you can somehow understand that I love my Mother very dearly. Taking away the funding for her care at McKendree Village is a nightmare for me and I think of it as a travesty of justice.

Whoever is forcing this issue to happen or endorses harsh actions against McKendree should be relieved of their responsibility. I say this because it is blatantly apparent that they do not know the real life situations regarding this type of issue. The actions taken against McKendree are most hurtful to the very people our Department of Health officials are charged with protecting.

I sincerely hope and am requesting your help to stop the harm being done…actually to my Mother…by the Tennessee Department of Health.

Respectfully,

Chuck Lister