Mike has MediCAL. No decent places will take MediCAL as an original placement. He was in two nursing homes for a couple of days each after his two DBS brain surgeries. Both were in Los Angeles, way down by LAX, 36 miles one-way from home. We had no choice. No beds in MediCAL facilities closer. They were old, crowded facilities where most patients are non-English speaking, and of course the staff is foreign, too.
Three to a room so crowded that visitors can't be in the room at the same time, and if a nurse needs to come in to check something, there isn't enough room at the patient's bedside for both. Where the big, bulky 25-year-old TV on the wall for all three beds doesn't have cable. Where your food sits for hours if for some reason you can't eat, no one takes it away nor offers something else. Where the buzzers are missing and if there is one, nobody comes anyway.
Where one was an Alzheimer's lock-down facility. Patients sat on the floor in the hall and rocked back and forth and moaned. Where, when taken out in wheelchairs to get some air, a tiny concrete space in the back is chain-link fenced all around and up top, and it faces an alley where big trucks lumber by splashing the sewer water than runs in the center trough. I took him out of there in one day!
Places like Fairwinds and the facilities my friends' families are in down in San Diego, and the development in Bartlesville where Bob's cousins were, are for people who have good insurance and a little money. My son, who became disabled in his 40s and has not been able to work in 11 years, has no money left and has shitty MediCAL insurance that no one will take. So he gets to go wherever the County can find him a bed, out in Timbucktoo where family cannot easily see him, places on busy streets with no parking thereby impossible for me to go with my back and leg problems, the kind of places I described above.
That is why we do everything we can to keep Mike at home.