By Judith Graham
It wasn’t the Thanksgiving holiday any of us had expected.
Two weeks before, my 94-year-old father-in-law, Melvin Zax, suffered a stroke after receiving dialysis and was rushed to a hospital near his residence in western New York.
There, he underwent a series of tests over the course of several days. With each test, Mel became more agitated. His hearing aids weren’t working right, and he didn’t understand what was happening.
Amid the hubbub of a busy hospital, Mel wasn’t sleeping at night. He became delirious, a frightening and all-too-common experience for older adults who are hospitalized.
For two days, Mel was housed in the emergency department; the hospital had no regular rooms available. Similar scenarios are playing out across the country, as hospitals stagger under a surge in respiratory illnesses and covid-19-fueled cases alongside acute staffing shortages. Older Americans are at particular risk: About 1 in 5 emergency department visits are made by people 60 and older.
An ongoing crisis in long-term care options has contributed to the bottleneck. Some seniors are occupying hospital rooms longer than necessary because there’s no place else for them to go. Many nursing homes and home care agencies aren’t accepting new patients because they simply don’t have enough workers.
Staffing issues at my father-in-law’s hospital were apparent. My husband, who was at a conference in Montreal when his dad was first hospitalized, called repeatedly but couldn’t get through to a nurse or a doctor for hours. As far as we knew, Mel’s stroke was tended to promptly, but the lack of clear communication left us with lingering doubts. How often did nurses check on him in the subsequent hours and days? How were decisions about testing made, and what consideration was given to Mel’s advanced age?
Mel was a distinguished psychologist who’d worked part time until age 90 and remained mentally sharp. But he’d had diabetes for decades and since September 2020 had been getting dialysis three times a week, a grueling therapy for kidney failure. “I’m a wreck,” he would tell my husband over the phone after returning from a session.
I’d written about dialysis for the elderly, and I knew the statistics: Patients 85 and older live, on average, two years after beginning treatment. Mel had already beaten the odds by surviving 26 months. Did the hospital staff realize how frail he was and adjust their treatment and testing regimens accordingly?
“Ask for a geriatrician consultation,” I advised my husband, who has legal and medical power of attorney for his father and was now at his side.
I worried that nothing being done at the hospital — electrocardiograms, CT scans, an attempted MRI scan (Mel couldn’t tolerate that), an order to wear a heart monitor — would change Mel’s prospects. And he was increasingly agitated, groaning and throwing his arms out in seeming distress. (HN/KHN)