Andrew Cuomo killed my Mother
The greatest trick Covid-19 ever pulled was to convince the public that Andrew Cuomo was anything but a corporate puppet. The governor who blocked effective rent relief, gutted the subway system and exploited prison labor spent 2020 basking in the praise of liberals and progressives for the very low bar of not being Trump.
Fox News certainly played into the Trump vs. Cuomo narrative. When the nursing home deaths became impossible to ignore, Fox News couldn’t stop talking about Andrew Cuomo placing recovering covid-19 patients in nursing homes even with a navy ship and Javits Center set aside for that purpose. Fox News pushed these stories so aggressively with an implied defense of Republican policies that it’s very easy to forget that Cuomo not only pushed thousands of potentially infectious patients into the most vulnerable populations but he also bestowed lawsuit immunity upon these same nursing homes. Fox News was understandably silent on this law. Mitch McConnell spent the last six months trying to attach immunity for his corporate donors in the stimulus plan. Fox News was not about to give the game away by admitting that Cuomo managed to pass a Republican wish list law. They certainly aren’t about to admit that immunity from lawsuits automatically leads to malfeasance.
I did not know about the immunity law in March 2020. I only knew that I was no longer able to visit Mom at Isabella Geriatric Center. I was worried about her. In 2019, I had moved Mom into Isabella Geriatric because she had lost the ability to walk and could no longer stay in her assisted living center. Since she had to live in a nursing home, I found a place near me instead of 2000 miles away. I made certain to visit every day. Mom was lonely. She missed her cat. Isabella Geriatric could not be bothered to hire enough staff members to adequately care for the residents. I counted seven employees for a floor with 100 residents. I complained about short staffing, but no one expected a change. Mom’s social worker even laughed when I asked.
As long as I could visit, Mom wasn’t neglected. She would argue with staff members. I would smooth things over. She didn’t want to eat the disgusting food. i would buy sushi. Medicare kept cutting off her OT/PT and I would convince the RN to refer her for more sessions. I would wheel Mom to the rest of the building and make certain that she participated in activities like arts & crafts. The few days when I couldn’t visit, Mom would just stay in her room alone.
Even when I was visiting, I could see how isolation was having an effect. Mom’s hallucinations were becoming more frequent. In the past few years, Mom had begun seeing things but the hallucinatory episodes were sporadic. She would see cats running around her room for 24 hours but then nothing for months. By the time she was living in Isabella, her hallucinations became less intense but more common. She thought that her non-verbal roommate talked to her. She saw extra doors in her room.
One afternoon before occupational therapy, Mom soiled herself. I told a staff member about it. I tried to get someone to actually clean her. No one was available. The woman who was supposed to clean my mom was on lunch break. No one else on the floor had the time or the inclination. Even as I stood near the front desk asking them to find someone to do the basic nursing home attendant job, it took them an hour to find someone to do it.
No one recognized that my mom was having hallucinations. No one could be bothered to clean my mom when she soiled herself. That’s the way Isabella Geriatric acted when I was visiting every day. I don’t blame the individual staff members. Most were quite lovely, but when you have one employee for every thirty residents the neglect is inevitable. Isabella Geriatric was never going to hire enough people to adequately serve the residents because that would cut into their profits.
With Andrew Cuomo passing a law severely limiting the ability of caregivers to sue for negligence, there’s no external reason for any nursing home to hire the necessary staff.
When I received the call informing me that I would not be allowed to visit Mom after that day, I was upset. I asked them if they were going to hire people to make up for the shortage of free labor from volunteers and loved ones. I was told that they would not. I complained about the neglect and the Isabella admin informed me that they were doing everything in compliance with New York State Law (which they helped write). I was told that I could always move Mom to a different nursing home if I didn’t feel like they were doing an adequate job. We both knew that wasn’t going to happen. I cried a great deal that day. I visited Mom twice because I knew I would probably never see her alive again.
Like I said, I didn’t know about the immunity law that Andrew Cuomo pushed through the legislature almost as soon as he received emergency powers. Nursing homes like Isabella Geriatric had been operating with dangerously short staffing policies for years. In an ideal world, the covid-19 pandemic should have been a wake-up call to nursing homes like Isabella Geriatric. In the absence of valuable resources of unpaid volunteers and loved ones, Isabella Geriatric should have counteracted the woefully understaffed setting if only to keep their residents from dying alone and afraid. They might have put the needs of their residents above the profit motivation if only for the the first few months of the pandemic when things were dire.
Instead, Cuomo gave them immunity. They didn’t have to worry about their residents because no matter how many people they killed, they were protected from liability. So they operated at their usual level of incompetence and put up signs claiming that their underpaid and overworked staff were HEROES. There’s even a sign outside the building stating that HEROES WORK HERE. In the covid-19 era, calling underpaid stressed out workers is the equivalent of “thoughts and prayers”.
As the residents started dying, my mom’s situation became worse. Throughout March and April, no one took her out of her room. No one bothered to visit her. I called her on her cell phone but she didn’t always answer. She was scared and lonely. She felt that the staff was bullying her. She continued to soil herself and the staff would leave her lying in her own feces for hours. I would call the front desk to tell them and they would act like I was being unreasonable. Eventually the staff members wouldn’t even answer the phone. Even after security gave me the direct number to the third floor, I would listen to the phone ring.
I could still bring food as long as I waited downstairs for someone to come down and pick it up. She had stopped eating the garbage food entirely and relied on my daily food deliveries. I would wait in the front lobby for someone to come down. I would tell the security to call up. I would call up. No one came down. One time I waited for almost two hours. When someone did come down to pick up the phone, they looked haggard.
By mid-April, my mom’s mental state had deteriorated to the point where her hallucinations took over. These hallucinations, which had been mild before the shutdown, scared me. She thought she was running a cat charity. She talked about floating to the ceiling. She thought that people on the television were talking to her. She was seeing even more cats. She told my cousin that I had been fatally stabbed while walking through the neighborhood. She was certain that the workers were putting wires into her food.
By the end of April, I discovered why I couldn’t reach anyone at the front desk. In the five weeks since Isabella Geriatric followed state guidelines and closed the building to the public, they had allowed 96 residents to die under its watch. They ran at the same low standards from before the lockdown and the few staff members working on the floors were too busy with the dying to even worry about anyone like my mom. They operated at this level because they knew that no matter how many people they killed, they were protected from lawsuits.
Even after making national headlines for killing 96 people Isabella did not take steps to improve safety. Instead they sent arrogant letters to loved ones. They went on a PR offensive. They waited for another nursing home to get caught killing even more residents. One time when I waited for someone to take food up to Mom, I heard a nurse joking with the security guard about the negative press. Their attitude reflected the same attitude in the letter which was “these people are going to die anyhow. What’s the big deal?”
Finally in May, Mom was tested for covid-19 for the first time. Almost two months after the lockdown that was supposed to prevent infections, Mom tested positive. Mom’s physical and mental state had deteriorated so much that the nurse was feeding her intravenously.
Around this time, Andrew Cuomo’s staff started lying about the nursing home death tolls. The official statement from Melissa DeRosa boils down to “whoopsies, we were just trying to keep the Trump administration from exploiting it.” This story is contradicted by the fact that the immunity law was in danger of being repealed. I remember Cuomo responding to the death toll by repeating the same garbage about HEROES until the press stopped talking about the deaths. Then suddenly like magic, the nursing home death toll went down. Thanks to Letitia James we know why.
Early in May, my mom starting receiving hospice care. Suddenly I could visit under the hospice care exception. Mom’s mood improved. The Sunday before I was allowed to visit, Mom was talking to me on the phone. She sounded more lucid than she had since the lockdown. She seemed happy.
Then two Isabella staff members charged into her room and just threw everything she owned into plastic bags. They didn’t warn her. They just decided to move her two rooms down. She screamed at them. She put me on the phone. They informed me that they were moving everyone because of covid-19. I tried to calm Mom down, but whatever emotional stability she had mustered was gone. They didn’t even need to move Mom since her room was already designated as a covid-19 positive room. Yet, they moved her and ruined her last days alive for no reason except bookkeeping.
I still couldn’t visit Mom until that Wednesday. I called her and she just babbled into the phone for hours. When I finally visited her, she spent hours in her hallucinations. She saw the cats. She yelled for her (dead former) roommate to give her the lists for the imaginary charity. She held the bed post in terror because she was certain she was falling off. She tore at the IV. The last thing she said to me was “please don’t leave” as she held onto the bed frame terrified of floating away. After that day, she was asleep with rapidly decreasing oxygen levels.
I don’t know if Mom would be alive today had it not been for Isabella Geriatric’s negligence. I know that Isabella Geriatric stonewalled me when I tried to obtain Mom’s medical records. I know that the first lawyer wanted to file the paperwork for a lawsuit but found Cuomo’s law insurmountable. The second law firm is exploring class action but is also certain that the law needs to be repealed first. I know that Isabella Geriatric has forbidden its employees — past and present — from talking to lawyers, investigators and press by threatening reprisals.
I wrote this article mainly because I was sick of seeing clueless leftists defending Cuomo. I’ve seen the meme that calls Cuomo’s treatment a lynching and compares his sexual harassment favorably to Trump’s sexual harassment. I’ve seen the conspiracy theories. I’ve seen midwesterners like David Gerrold speculate that a Cuomo resignation or impeachment opens up the possibility to a Republican governor who could stop the Trump investigation.
Note that Letitia James is the district attorney who investigated both Andrew Cuomo and Donald Trump. If Cuomo can’t shut down an investigation into his own misdeeds, how is a Republican governor going to shut down an investigation into Trump? New York progressives are stronger than ever. The closest New York has to a Republican governor is Andrew Cuomo.
Finally, if you’ve read this far and you’re a New York resident, please go to https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/A3397 and express your support for repealing Cuomo’s immunity law that allowed nursing homes to neglect their patients without fear. My mom died alone and afraid. It’s too late to save her. But at least she should have justice.