Huge Unexplained Bruises on a Cancer Patient in an Ontario Long Term Care Home

My Mom is living her last days at a long term care home in Stouffville, Ontario. We try to be there as much as possible to be with her. There are three of us iving in the GTA area and we take turns visiting mom on a daily basis. I visited Mom the previous day and the next day was my sister’s turn to visit and feed my mom.

Last week my sister was alarmed as she noticed a huge bruise on her foot. My sister sent out a picture via What’s Hap. I was surprised because between the time I left mom at 7:15 to the time when my sister visited her, it was less than 24 hours and how she sustained a huge bruise like that, nobody knew. 

 The nurses and PSW could not give an explanation of how this occurred. Later, it was explained to us that she got this bruise as her skin is so easily bruised now. The simple action of her putting her one foot on top of the other had caused that. Really?

 I found that difficult to understand. With the shortage of nursing and medical staff in Ontario hospitals and long term care facilities, many of these institutions resort to hiring personal support workers and nursing staff from agencies which we feel do not provide adequate training for their personnel. What can we do when medical institutions are facing such acute shortage of staff?

The families of these residents and patients need to visit more often and become the caregivers to their loved ones. We do our parts. When we visit, we usually visit at meal time to coax her to eat. After mealtime, I would take her into the lounge, and we sat together looking outside and looked for the birds flying through the sky or the ducks swimming in the pond. The sight of the aviary animals delighted my mom. Most of the time, we just sat side by side, with me holding her hand. No words needed to be spoken. I love my mom and I was there for her. She knows it and she was content just feeling my presence.

My husband has been very supportive; he drives me to visit and play a game with Mom when she feels up to it.

She is experiencing more pain now as the cancer growth progresses. She is complaining about headaches, aches on her neck, shoulder, her left arm, leg. Tylenol was given to reduce her pain, but when that didn’t hurt, the last resort was Morphine. I noticed that after morphine was given, my mom started to sleep a lot. Before when I got there, she was happy and wanted to go with me, talking with me, singing and watching the videos I showed her. Now she is sleeping most of the time, hardly awakes.

 R.T. Toronto