New Medico: One tale of greed and of sorrow

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

Complaints about New Medico Health Care System of Lynn, the nation's largest chain of head-injury rehabilitation facilities, have led to investigations by the United State's Attorney's office in Boston, the New York State Health Department and a congressional sub-committee. Adelaide Powers is a patient at Lenox Hill, one of New Medico's 36 facilities.

Her voice is a rasp on the phone. "Can you come?" she whispers. "I have things to tell you."

I go. On the Expressway, through the tunnel, over the Lynnway into another world.

I park on a rutted road. Step gingerly down a steep, gravel incline. Step over candy wrappers, week-old papers, dented cans. Find the entrance. Follow the canopy. Sign in. Up the elevator, down the hall. Doors are closed, lights dim, the walls bare. One man struts around in his underwear. Others just mill about.

Most sit in wheelchairs. Many hunch over video games. Someone screams. Someone cries. Metal whines, steady as a heartbeat. A walker scrapes like chalk on a board.

Adelaide Powers, 38, sits in a wheelchair in a room she shares with two other people. The room is ugly, with its dull floor, a filthy window looking out over traffic and tarred roofs and macadam, makeshift closets and paper-thin bedspreads.

I close the door but the sounds still intrude.

"This is how they presented this place," she says in a voice that you have to strain to hear. She hands me a 9 x 12 four-color glossy booklet with photographs of rolling hills and oak tables and bright, new, beautiful accommodations.

"Read where it promises `to restore each individual to the highest possible level of functioning and independence.' That's what I wanted. To live independently. To be able to see my children."

Four years ago, Adelaide Powers had a normal life. She lived in an apartment in Queens, N.Y., with her three children, worked full time as a legal secretary and spent her spare time with her twin sister and her mother.

Then the migraines she'd always had escalated into something more.

"I'd pick up a milk carton and drop it. I'd get up from a chair and fall."

At work one day she passed out. A doctor said she'd had a stroke. Another said it was a seizure.

She had more seizures. She lost strength in her legs and needed braces to walk. At the hospital where she was a patient for a year, she had five to six hours of therapy every day. But she couldn't remain at the hospital. She had to go to a nursing home or to a rehabilitation center.

The rehabilitation center was hours away from family and friends.

"`You'll only be there about three months. It won't be forever.' That's what the people from New Medico told me. They said the therapy would be intense and that I would improve."

Adelaide, full of hope and accompanied by her sister, flew to Massachusetts.

"When I saw the place I was shocked," her sister Antoinette says. "It was nothing like they had promised."

There were no green hills, no pastoral setting, no plush living rooms or bedrooms, no deluxe accommodations, no greenhouses, no carpets, no bright colors, no modern equipment. Lenox Hill was an elaborate lie.

Still, a place doesn't have to look wonderful to be wonderful. That's what Antoinette told Adelaide as she kissed her good-bye.

That was two years ago. Today, Adelaide doesn't wear leg braces anymore. She sits in a wheelchair, her legs useless, her muscles atrophied, her feet bent as if she had been hobbled, her left hand gnarled and useless.

"Since coming here I have steadily declined," she said.

Adelaide says she gets just two hours of physical and two hours of occupational therapy a week, and that she has had no real vocational training. She is given a shower only every three days. Last May the air conditioner in her room broke. It wasn't fixed until August. She asked to shower more often. Her request was denied.

She has no phone in her room and no privacy. Three times during the two hours we talked, a male patient opened her bedroom door and wandered in.

"They say don't worry about him. He won't hurt you. He only pees on people. He's peed all over the food in the dining room. But he's harmless. That's their attitude.

"There are patients walking around here soaking wet with pee because diapers are too expensive. The patient next to me hadn't had a shower in three weeks. I had to tell the aides to give her one. I have to remind them to feed her. I was throwing up one night for 50 minutes before they answered the bell. One night I choked, and it was a half-hour before anyone came."

She hasn't seen her doctor since the end of January. She's had a broken tooth since September but no one will take her to have it fixed. She hasn't seen a plum or grapes or a pear since she has been here.

"I shouldn't get so upset over things like a meal, but I'm so powerless and frustrated and angry.

"I'm known as a troublemaker because I refuse to take a double dose of medication when an aide comes around.

"Most of the people here can't speak for themselves. They don't know what's going on. So I have to speak for them. This is not the place they said it would be. I wouldn't have come here. I want to get out of here.

"My doctor says, `Forget about your legs. You will never walk with them.' I know this. I can live with this. But what I can't live with is this place. They're supposed to focus on abilities not just disabilities. I want a purpose for being. I want what they promised me. I want to do something, not just vegetate here. I want to be of some use and not just a burden on the taxpayers of New York."

The taxpayers of New York spend close to $1,000 a day for long-term rehabilitative care. A suite at the Ritz costs $500.

"When you're in the business of caring for people you should do a better job than this," Adelaide says. "I'm dying a little bit every day."