-Our elderly should be the most respected
and revered in our society,
and, apparently, they are the most disposable.
When this whole thing came out that just two people --
one employee and one resident of Life Care Center --
had COVID, immediately,
they should have shut everything down --
no more visitors, get the CDC involved,
just get everybody involved, and they didn't.
And 37 people have died.
It's hard to lose our mom 'cause she's supercool.
A lot of us, I think, are still in shock,
and then, you know, sometimes, oh, I think,
"Oh, I got to go call my mom," and I'm like, "Oh, I can't."
One week she was totally doing fine,
telling me what she's gonna do and how she's gonna do it,
and then the next week,
she immediately went downhill, like, drastically.
She couldn't breathe.
She was having a hard time breathing.
She was losing her voice,
and we thought she was gonna die the next day.
I mean, it went very quickly.
It was the minute that they took her off the IVs
and her medication when she went extremely downhill,
because, you know, you can't put cancer and coronavirus together
because, obviously, it's gonna kill you quicker than it would
if she just continued living with her cancer
that she's had for the past four years.
-That was pretty hard, just seeing her kind of
almost suffering every day,
'cause I was there day and night.
There was one point where she said,
"Are you gonna just let me die here?"
And I said, "No, Mom." I said, "No, of course not."
But I could tell she was very scared and serious about that.
It's just the way she said it.
And at one point, you know, I was holding her hand,
and I just remember I had to kind of turn
and look out the window because I --
it was very upsetting for me.
At that point, I just knew that there's nothing we can do.
There's nothing anyone can really do at this point.
I can see she's -- she's not coming back.
We're scared to death, literally.
She -- Her roommate was gone,
and her friend that visited her three times a day,
Loretta, was gone.
So, these were people that she was in close contact with.
And we tried to get her tested.
We kept -- every day.
Finally, one day, she had chest heaviness,
and so they called and said that they were gonna send her in
and have her checked, X-ray, at the hospital.
So it was there that they tested her.
Now we visit her
through a windowpane. [laughter] Hi, Mom.
-How are you? -I'm good.
How are you?
So, we sit and try and lift her spirits, and we uh --
Are you holding the button down?
Tell crass jokes and get her to laugh,
which then results in coughing, but she laughs,
and that's what we're hoping to do, is to lift her spirits.
-This has bee na stressful time. -Yeah.
-Not only for me, but for you and your husband, your children.
-The whole world, Mom. The whole world has anxiety.
-She can't even sit up, you know, like, on the edge
of the bed to eat her breakfast or something.
She can't even do that on her own anymore,
and she was so strong before.
It's just heartbreaking.
She is so physically weak now, and right now she's getting
physical therapy a few times a day,
so I'm hopeful that that may help,
but I just don't see where she's gonna get back
to baseline anytime soon, and we want her to come home.
-I brought my granddaughter in there.
They had a Mardi Gras party in there.
This is shameful behavior.
People lost their lives because they didn't do
what they should have done.
-We've not had a funeral or anything yet.
She's still kind of in this waiting
with a lot of other people,
'cause I've talked to the owner of the funeral home,
and they're just overwhelmed.
Not ready for all this to happen, like, you know,
nobody is, and there's been a lot of people dying from this.
I still feel she's always here with us, and my thing is
that I just want to keep on doing what she would want --
you know, even helping rescue animals,
which both my sisters and I -- we do a lot of that.
I just want to keep doing
what my mom would want us to keep doing,
and that's how we kind of keep going on with it.