“I feel like I’m living in a horror movie,” Quebec screenwriter Marie Vien told me yesterday.
The person who wrote the screenplays for the Arlette films “La passion d’Augustine, 14 jours 12 nuits” is currently going through a waking nightmare. Or rather, his sister Dominique, 67, in the final stages of early Alzheimer’s disease, saw a horror movie in a CHSLD…not air-conditioned.
Yes, you read that right: in 2023, in Quebec, in the middle of a heat wave, Dominique Vien doesn’t even have the right to a fan, air conditioning, or a cool shower.
THE QUEBEC MODEL?
If Marie Vien wrote this story in one of these scripts, the producers would say to her: “Come on Marie, you’re exaggerating, this is a caricature!” Nobody will believe that in our beautiful Quebec we treat sick people like that! »
On Wednesday, Marie went to her sister’s bedside at CHSLD Vigi Reine-Elizabeth in Montreal. She found Dominique in her bed giving birth. Marie took a picture of the thermostat. It was 30 degrees in the room. On the other hand, the director’s office is air-conditioned.
Yesterday on QUB radio, Marie Vien told me about the Kafkaesque journey she had to go through to get basic care for her sister who is at the end of her life.
Photo provided by family
Dominica Vienna
When she asked what had been done to refresh the residents, Marie Vien was told that the recreation department came to distribute ice cream!
When she asked why her sister hadn’t been showered, she was told it was “not her day”.
According to the bureaucratic care plan, Dominique was not entitled to a shower that day. Even if Quebec experiences a heat wave. Even though it’s 30 degrees in her room.
When officials in their air-conditioned offices in Quebec tell you that one room per CHSLD is air-conditioned for residents to go there to freshen up, think of Dominique: she can’t leave her room. You are too bad. Prisoners of her overheated room.
Here’s how we’re treating vulnerable people in Quebec in 2023.
In November 2021 I interviewed Marie Vien on QUB radio. She had told me about another scandal. The CHSLD had installed plywood to block her sister’s door below, preventing residents from leaving the home.
“She has been locked in this room for more than ten days and she will have a few more days to come,” Marie Vien told me.
She eats alone, morning, noon, evening. She is being washed in a sink, she is not allowed to take a shower. We don’t wash her hair, I washed her hair in a sink. His health and memory are completely weak. »
INHUMAN TREATMENT
For two years, Marie has been fighting to get her sister’s (and other residents’) room air conditioned.
At her wit’s end Mary went to Canadian Tire yesterday to buy some portable air conditioners with her own money to cool her sister down.
Can you imagine going to the cinema and seeing this scene on screen? You wouldn’t believe your eyes.
But at least you’d be in a room… with air conditioning.
