I haven’t been staying on top of this blog, mainly because I was taking care of a sick cousin whose son predeceased her and none of her first cousins would deal with her issues. She went through 15 admissions and readmissions into medical facilities after an operation went terribly wrong. I had to create an army of support from a home aide group, to a social worker, to a bookkeeper, to health advocates. I did everything but save her life.

I put aside my writing for the months preceding and during and following the operation because I had no time to focus on anything between all the paperwork and emergency calls, the legal issues, the phone by my head whenever I slept.

But above all, I am now blogging about this because I want to warn all of you. If you have a loved one who is aged, beware the rush to put them on antipsychotics. There are doctors who will ignore the advanced directives. They will tell you a loved one is in a coma and to pull the plug when in fact they are overdosed on these things. They will use these drugs to add to the complications to end a life because they see your sick relative as a drain on their system.

And medicare will ignore the complaints.

The use of these drugs on the old and sick has become an epidemic all over the country and there are plenty in the medical profession using them to speed up the death of a patient deliberately. They are using them to commit murder and are getting away with it.

Beware a drug called seroquol. Besides making one comatose, it will mess with sugar levels. Beware of a drug called risperidone. It’s also called the “shut up” drug. They use it to shut up the moans of pain and distress of patients who have no mental illness, a drug meant for the most severely psychotic who are a danger to his or herself or others. They are using these drugs in hospitals and rehabs and nursing homes. Both drugs will bring on dysphagia to the point of a complete inability to talk and eat. Both drugs will bring on what appears to be coma. They put my relative on these things as she screamed in pain from an open wound, sepsis, gangrene. They put her on these things, this “dangerous” person, rigid in her arms and legs. People on this drug have later said they see and feel everything, but can’t talk or respond.

It takes weeks, and in some cases months, to wean people off these drugs, particularly risperidone, and I demanded the last rehab she was in do so when it was discovered she’d been put on 7.5 mgs of it while comatose from her last bout of sepsis. That’s about 15 times the amount a sick person in her condition can be given safely. Because of the drug, she never recovered her full ability to eat and drink before she died because the rehab could only get her down safely a milligram a week, too late by the time she was in hospice to have anything back but her mind as friends said their last goodbyes.

It will take months to get past the nightmares I’m experiencing since her death, the nightmare of having to tell the cat sitter there’d be no more money to board the pet that nobody would foster, the endless fights with doctors who abused these drugs, the kindness of the few who tried to stop the abuse.

But I have returned to revising my novel one last time, which I took back from an interested agent. I am grateful I have my life to finish my novel, that I have that time at all. We are, none of us, here that long. And I pray I have the strength to continue to express and do whatever necessary to get out the message that our healthcare system is now a killing field of the aged because of the inappropriate use of these new drugs by certain medical professionals, drugs that have those blackbox warnings on them by the pharmaceutical companies. So it isn’t the pharmaceutical companies committing the crime, it is people using and abusing them. These are people who don’t belong in these medical environments at all, but in jail.

(This picture is a group of family members from my mother’s father’s family. Poland circa 1900 more or less.)