If you’re ever placed in a home for the elderly, the last thing you want happening is being mistaken for a corpse. While that does technically sound impossible, one woman experienced this earlier in January.
According to reports done by state inspectors in Iowa, a resident at the Glen Oaks Alzheimer’s care center was taken in, due to her declining health in late December last year. Several days later, she was found to be dead.
Special care center fined $10k for sending living woman to funeral home
The problem is she actually wasn’t dead.
The worker who checked for her pulse must’ve not felt it and declared her to be dead. That’s despite her having her eyes wide open, which led to what can only be described as one of the most horrific experiences anyone could go through.
* A care centre in the US has been fined $10,000 after a funeral home discovered a woman sent to it in a body bag was still alive. The Iowa Department of Inspection and Appeals said the 66-year-old woman was declared dead at the Glen Oaks Alzheimer's Special Care Centre pic.twitter.com/bOygK7Z94W
— TSC International News (@news_tsc) February 3, 2023
The next morning, a funeral home director arrived at the facility and helped place the supposedly “dead” woman onto a gurney and into a body bag.
However, it wouldn’t take long for the staff to notice the bag soon began to move. As they unzipped it, they found the woman inside was gasping for air and they called an EMT to assist her.
Despite her showing signs of life, her eyes remained fixed in place. She wasn’t speaking to anyone in the room, which may be why the staff at the care facility thought her to be dead.
After receiving emergency medical care, the woman was transported back to the care facility, where she was placed in hospice, only for her to die two days later, with her family right next to her.
An Iowa woman was pronounced dead and put inside a body bag and taken to a funeral home where she was found to be alive!!??
— bigtzdesigns.com (@TNjhd) February 3, 2023
Poor judgment from the family
Records show the woman was originally taken into the facility in late 2021 when she was diagnosed with end-age and early-onset dementia.
Starting in December 2022, almost a full year after she was admitted, the woman was placed into hospice with strict do-not-resuscitate orders.
While the service the facility provided was sufficient up until her “death,” the irresponsible treatment that followed was found to be inexcusable by the state court. Glen Oaks was fined $10k, which is embarrassingly low for an incident of this caliber.
On the other hand, Glen Oaks doesn’t fall under the federal regulations that standard nursing homes do, seeing as it’s not a skilled nursing facility per se.
Woman mistakenly pronounced dead was found alive in body bag, report says. And how was your day?
— Jersey (@shothit1) February 3, 2023
Actually, Glen Oaks is nothing more than a residential care home that offers daily living activities with some minor assistance for its residents. They can’t be held fully accountable for what happened.
What this means is the woman should’ve been placed in a qualified nursing home, rather than a care facility, seeing as she doesn’t fit the requirements for being in one.
Due to this, the Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals was light on the Glen Oaks care facility and decided the entirety of the blame doesn’t fall on them, but also on the family.
