Taking the "Nurse" out of Nursing Home

I have had enough experience now with nursing homes--as the daughter of someone who has been living in one for more than five years--to know that very little nursing takes place in these facilities, and they are NOTHING like home. In my mother's nursing home, the nurses on duty are LPNs. We're very lucky if the LPN in charge knows much of anything, and they aren't always good people managers. The understaffed staff is overworked. They're clearly not well-screened, as they have been robbing residents blind all these years, my mother included. Her wedding ring was stolen a few months back, and before that just about anything attractive or of any value would just disappear. And that was the case even after I put up a sign saying, "Thou Shalt Not Steal."

Of course there are some real sweethearts--people who don't complain about doing the work and who actually DO it, and who care about their charges--but there are always those who will lie to you to make life more convenient for them, or those who have emotional and personality disorders or problems so severe they agitate family members, or at best act as if we have no say in the matter.

Now we're trying to find a way to get our dying mother into a Catholic nursing home where she will feel, we hope, a sense of spiritual peace....or at least some support of that nature. But the nursing home we visited apparently decided we didn't look or act rich enough: we are "Medicaid" people, not the wealthy middle-class types they prefer to associate with. We're fat, not 100 percent healthy, and we look it. And it's easy even for these "Catholics" to find themselves so superior to us because of the way we look and because of the state of our finances. But we have education, skills, training, talents, that might very well overshadow these self-righteous people, and that includes our mother too!! We are just as Middle Class as they, except for our pocketbooks, and yet we are looked down upon; thought to be just a little lower than scum, I guess. This does not sound very Catholic to me; certainly not Christian at all....but how to get the point across when the snubbing is veiled in lies and excuses?

I really think our public schools need to reinstate not just civics courses but ethics courses (and I mean personal as well as corporate ethics) and courses in moral and personal development. Obviously parents aren't doing a decent job of teaching people these days!!! Somebody's got to do it, or our most vulnerable citizens will continue to succumb to the worst of human nature.