A Place You Want to Avoid : A seven-week stay in a nursing home provides first-hand insight into the dehumanizing system we’ve set up to provide care for the elderly.

Many of us have a secret horror: that we will someday be put into a nursing home.

It happened to me a few months ago. Unlike many patients, I went in, got better and came out. I hope never to go back.

Separated after a 30-year marriage, I’d lived alone for 10 years, had gone from an old-fashioned dependent role to an independent one. I found a job, wrote professionally, had many supportive friends. Now surgery for a broken hip was sending me for physical therapy to a convalescent center (euphemism for nursing home) in Canoga Park.

On my ride down the hall, I saw the wheelchair lineup against the wall. Some patients were attached to oxygen machines. One crooned to a doll. Another studied his leg. One shouted insults.

I was laid on a bed to await a change of nightgown. My first indication of the status of patients was how the nurse introduced me to my roommate, a woman of 81.

“This is Rose,” she said. “You’ll find her to be very alert.”

Rose, lying in bed, said hello. I found later that she was alert, when her family visited. Most of the day, however, she stayed in bed and stared out the window.

From a room across the hall whose door was labeled “infectious” there emerged two female aides wearing white rubber gloves.

They came to my bedside to put me in a nightgown. Where had those hands been? I asked them to put on clean gloves. They shook their heads.

I demanded, protested, shouted. I told them my children were both physicians. Finally out of weariness I gave up--my first experience of simply losing my will to fight, succumbing to helplessness. The aides told me later they had been sure I was a crazy person.

I was just as upset and helpless a few weeks later when I was using the bathroom one day.

In burst a man who announced he was going to fit me for a brace and didn’t have time to wait.

“What are you doing in here?” I demanded. “Get out!”

“I do this all the time,” he explained. And he didn’t get out till he had measured me.

Yes, I complained. No, he was not scolded, as far as I know.

About six weeks into my visit, Rose died. She had just taken her evening pill from the premed student who pushed the medicine cart from room to room. Then she closed her eyes and was quieter than usual and I thought something was wrong.

When I called for help, the student, a nurse and an aide hurried in and closed the curtains around me. When I asked what was happening, they said, “She’s resting.”

Footsteps came and went. For a while three of us shared the room: me, Rose and the aide, praying in Spanish. An hour or so later someone came with a conveyance and they took her away.

In my seven-week stay I learned the routine. It included screams every night. I learned that room-moppers would not do bathrooms--you had to wait for the bathroom-moppers. I learned that many of the low-paid staff worked two or three jobs. They seemed exhausted when they got to work.

Breakfast was usually cold. I would return it and they would do their best to heat it up. Generally, I was not hungry for it anyway.

How bad was the experience? Could I rewrite the regulations of nursing homes to make them all right? I don’t think so.

To be fair, the place was cleaner than most (I’d visited others). The decor was pleasant. I was not neglected. My physical rehabilitation was done professionally. I met some patients who were interesting and even inspiring, like the 88-year-old woman who ignored her catheter to pull weights, determined to get out of there.

The bad part was the loss of respect, the loss of dignity, the loss of will.

More and more people will be introduced to this world as life expectancy increases and the baby boomers reach maturity.

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Perhaps these places can be made all right. I do not discount the entertainment, art therapy and volunteer visitor programs that go on in them.

Perhaps convalescent homes could rigorously separate the handful of rehab patients from the confused permanent ones.

Perhaps the national service program now being proposed can include finding methods to keep people living at home.

Perhaps there are even ways to change the attitudes of nursing home workers toward their patients, and for that matter the attitudes of everyone toward the elderly and the disabled.

Perhaps.

But the day I left I vowed that if I ever had to return, I would choose death.