Joseph Bates 10/08/1947 - 09/17/2021

My dad was brought to the hospital on 09/08/2021.  My mother was already there and he hadn’t had much contact with her. He was worried. He wasn’t allowed to go see her and he was still sick himself. He was 6’4 and was recovering from being sick but when he would go from sitting to standing he would get dizzy and it was on 09/08/2021 that he fell. He hit his head on the tiles in the bathroom and though he seemed okay from it, he also admitted he had fallen two other times that he didn’t tell us about. My husband and I had to help him up this last time. We called 9-1-1.

The ambulance came quickly and treated my father much differently. They didn’t question bringing him in and gave him oxygen even before he was in ambulance. He was brought directly to the staff at the emergency room and triaged immediately without the hours in between. Again, we weren’t allowed to follow or be there with my dad, but I feel that he just wanted to be near my mom so he went very easily. Unfortunately, they kept them apart until the time that I saw him even though they were only a few doors down from one another. 

My dad’s oxygen was low but rose quickly and he didn’t need much at all. They put him in the Covid ICU as well. They x-rayed his neck and put him in a soft cervical collar. The staff had told me that he would go home once PT could talk to him about how to move from sitting to standing safely. The projection of his return home was 09/12/21.

My dad was also given a large amount of medications, including Remdesivir, though not as many medications as my mom. HE was also too old for Monoclonal antibodies. I knew he was recovering from his illness and I had no idea as to what medications he was being given until I received his medical records after his death. 

My dad continued to improve until my mom died. When he saw my mother in the hospital bed while I was there, he had the first understanding of what was happening to my mom. It was while we were there that he said to me, ‘this world is yours now. She is suffering. I can be angry, but I can be sad’ and I watched him break into the shards of a dad I once knew. He had no idea what was happening and no one had the decency to tell him and being him to my mom before that. 

When he was wheeled in to see my mom for the first and last time he was encased in a plexiglass box atop a wheelchair with the soft cervical collar. There was a door on the box only someone on the outside of the box could open and close.  He wasn’t allowed to leave his chair. He couldn’t do anything but hold her hand. He couldn’t hug her, hold her or get close to her due to the contraption he was in. It was one of the most depressing moments of what humans do to each other that I have ever witnessed. 

***I feel like I need to make another note here. I was in contact with my parents as much as I could be. No one was charging their phones or getting their phones to them. Often I would call their phones and they would be unanswered, then I would call the hospital floor and sometimes they would answer sometimes they wouldn’t. Most often, when they answered I would get the promise someone would call me back in a minute. But it would take over an hour at the very least. The hospital had tablets that I could talk to my parents over but I had to get someone on the hospital floor to open it up for me and bring it to my parents and be an interim, which was near impossible. And I was not allowed to be with either of my parents in person! I also was dealing with being sick myself, the decline of my mom, the confusion of my dad, my own grief as an only child and the emotions of a house of three children who had no idea what was going on and missed their Mimi and Pops who they saw every day and every night for their entire lives.

After my mom died, my dad refused to answer his phone and his oxygen plummeted. It was the first time he needed a full oxygen mask. He was given no support in the hospital. He started to take the oxygen mask off and the hospital’s answer to this was to restrain him to his bed. His beard was growing in and itching him, his wife of 51 years just died, he was given no information along the way and I was being kept from him as well. He was also a Vietnam Veteran who was blown up as a minesweeper, with PTSD.  

The hospital informed me that he was being restrained hours after they began to restrain him. I believe he was being given steroids at the time. I immediately demanded to see him through the tablets they had at the hospital. He was pulling against the restraints being loud and cursing about needing fresh air. My heart stopped, because my dad was the gentlest human being you could imagine. I asked them to take him off the restraints. The only option I was given was to keep him in the restraints or to put him on Hospice. I was told there were no other options at all, point blank, and he still had no support over what had happened in the last five days. 

I put him on Hospice. 

Over the next days he slipped away with the help of higher and higher doses of morphine. I never got to say good-bye, I still wasn’t allowed to see him regardless of how much I begged. Before he died, the hospice nurse FaceTimed me on her personal phone and allowed me to say I love you then she hung up.

Covid-19 is the cause of death on both of their death certificates. 

Both of their bodies were at the same funeral home. I was starting to completely check out and having been trained as an expressive arts therapist I understood that I was dissociating and disconnecting from my reality so I asked to see my dad’s body at the very least. I begged to be able to see him. I was told NO, it was Covid Protocol. They were then cremated and we held a double funeral. None of my family showed up in person. We held it in a space that could easily hold my two families (my parents were baby boomers with a lot of siblings and I have many cousins) and it was empty because everyone came on one small screen through Zoom set up on a tripod to the side of the space. I have never felt to alone in my life. As the taps were played and I was handed the flag from my dad’s service in the Marines, a new chapter in my life began that has been one of the hardest to date.  

I could have never imagined in a million years that this would be my story. I had two healthy parents. My mother always had a fear of hospitals and she had said she didn’t want to die in one. Then she died in one alone, unheard and afraid at the mercy of people who didn’t care. Even though I knew this about her, I still brought her in so scared of losing her. My dad was a beautiful man with the strongest immune system I know.

It wasn’t until I received the medical records when I brought up the courage to ask for them, after my own experience of shock and PTSD that I realized what actually happened. How my parent’s wishes with their treatments were denied. They were never gave informed consent and their questions were never answered. 

I have to live with the fact that I didn’t chain myself to the bed when my mom was dying so that she could have dignity and love surrounding her death. That I didn’t storm into the hospital and demand my mom be released once she was responsive after receiving oxygen. That I didn’t demand my father off the restraints without hospice. 

I have learned that other hospitals in the same Atlantic Health System, that weren’t the county seat and weren’t receiving financial incentives for deaths, Remdesivir and diagnosis, allowed patients to receive an exceptional amount of oxygen more before they were given other treatments. I have to live with the fact that I didn’t know that, that I sent them to the closest hospital which happened to be the county seat where they were only allowed 21 liters of oxygen before they took other measures. 

I have to live with the fact that I have three children who never got to say good-bye, to even understand what was happening when it was happening and all I can give them is what I remember. 

My parents were so very much more than this story. They were each 74 years of human experience treasured. But I know they would want to be part of opening people’s eyes to the truth of what happened. To have their truths come out. They would want to prevent this happening to anyone else! They were ignored, neglected, passed off, treated like things instead of human beings. They were taken before their time by people and systems that refused to offer them dignity, empathy and stole their sovereignty. They were treated as less than because of their vaccination status.

In their medical records we have found lies about what was said to the hospital from my husband. We have found requests for medication removal that weren’t honored. We have found that my parents were both given the Covid 19 Vaccination 1st dose while sick in the hospital and I know they would never have approved that, they were highly educated around what was happening with the vaccination. We have found the long lists of medications that I was not aware of or signed off on as my parents only child. We have found language around compliance where my parents were offering reasons but they were never looked into, instead passed off as moods. And each time I look further into the medical records I find more and more inconsistencies and questions. The thing is, Medical Records are written in a way that the average person isn’t meant to understand them or to follow the thread of logic. They are written in a way to hide the truth.