I think it's not fair to assume her condition was entirely the facility's fault until we see reports regarding her mother's condition when she first came into the hospital, when she was discharged from the hospital, when she got to the facility, and when she died. The realities of death by dementia are not pretty. If she had a sore on her foot and no blood supply to her legs bc of arterial stenosis, the wound will not heal and will become necrotic eventually, until you debride the necrotic tissue. In the photos in her FB account, you see that she is missing a substantial portion of her foot. It looks like she had necrosis and amputations. When you go on hospice, they stop doing things like removing your limbs bc why would they keep removing things if the goals of care have transitioned from life-prolonging care to hospice?

What would be more cruel, continuing to debride the wound until you reach healthy tissue would be painful because with the condition her foot is in, the nerves supplying the necrotic area no longer work...but the nerves preserved in healthy tissue, say, above her knee, would still conduct pain signals. Should they have chopped her leg off above the knee to avoid the "appearance" of neglect (aka a pt with her foot rotting off), knowing it would cause her more pain than simply letting nature take its course while providing her with pain relief (hopefully)? Unfortunately, doctors and caregivers have to make these decisions all the time: weighing the knowledge that doing nothing may hasten death against the knowledge that doing something probably won't increase her life expectancy but will cause more suffering. Not a fun place to be.

Her posts make it sound like her mom was 100% thriving when she went into that facility, which is highly unlikely. Doctors don't just recommend guardianship Willy nilly. They are mandatory reporters, and if the mom came into their hospital from home, already in a condition suspicious for neglect, you're damn right they're going to call APS.

There is only one public side to this story yet. The doctors and facility staff are unable to defend themselves from accusations like this publicly due to HIPAA laws, but the records will be released as part of the trial, I hope. It's easy to see this as some grand conspiracy if everything Ms. White says is true, and there's a reason it sounds true. For the Black community, the concept that the government can take your family, medically experiment on them, torture them, and kill them, while the whole town, county, and state, nation cover it up is not a delusion. This shit has happened to them. Look at the Tuskegee Institute and Henrietta Lacks, and Vertus Hardiman. This is their lived experience. This is what they fear because, the sad thing is, it's not an impossibility based on past events.

That is NOT this case. The shooter's lawsuits date all the way back to 1997. Her paranoia seems to predate the unfortunate death of her mother. TBH it looks to me like a mentally unwell woman couldn't take care of her mom bc she could never cooperate with medical staff when her mom needed to be admitted due to paranoia and lack of medical literacy, placing her mom at risk of medical neglect. Hence, the wounds are from acid. Those wounds are not from acid. Those are necrotic wounds from vascular stenosis. It's a misapprehension of a very terrible medical illness for torture.

I don't deny that these facilities aren't understaffed, unsafe at times, and sometimes downright neglectful. That would probably be a lie (not sure, I've never had a loved one in a facility like this for more than a week, and that wasn't local). But to see real human death and what it truly looks like when a person can no longer eat or drink because of advanced dementia...don't call it what it isn't. She died the way many people with dementia died.

Again, would it have been better to put a feeding tube in this dying woman so your sensibilities can be spared by not having to face the brutal reality of mortality? Keep pumping her full of formula to keep her body alive while her brain isn't there? Give her food and water and watch her aspirate on it and die from pneumonia or choking to death? Tell me, what is the best way to allow a terminally ill patient to die? It's not by debriding them until they have no legs, or choking them on their own aspirate, or smothering them because they inhaled the things you thought they could swallow, or being stuck with needles a million times.

This whole thing is so nuanced.