Southside Convalescent residents adjusting to new skilled
nursing facility
In their 58 years of marriage, Mac and Maxine Nisbet have moved
around Northern California quite a bit.
In their 58 years of marriage, Mac and Maxine Nisbet have moved around Northern California quite a bit.
Though moving hundreds of miles with kids and a truckload of furniture was always complex, the 1.8-mile move they made from Southside Convalescent Hospital to the county’s newest nursing facility last Tuesday was their toughest.
Maxine Nisbet is 88 and has Parkinson’s disease – even a relatively short move can be emotionally jarring and, at worst, result in a potentially fatal situation known as ‘relocation trauma.’
Last week Mac packed his wife’s possessions into the backseat of his Chevy Nova, folded her wheelchair in the trunk, and carefully lifted and placed Maxine in the passenger’s seat. Ten minutes later he was wheeling her in the front door of her new home, the William and Inez Mabie Skilled Nursing Facility at Hazel Hawkins Hospital.
“Everything really just went in apple pie order,” said Nisbet.
The Jan. 7 move seems to have gone just as well for the 46 other residents of the 70-year-old Southside Road hospital. That building was deemed seismically unsound and will revert back to the county, which hopes to use it as office space. All eyes are now on the new building, known informally as ‘the Mabie Center.’
After nine years of planning, a year of building and months of delayed move dates, it took only three well-coordinated hours to move everyone, their records, medicines and personal items to the shiny new 57-bed convalescent center next to Hazel Hawkins Hospital.
The move was months in the planning, and every detail and contingency had to be thought through by Anna Valentine, Director of Nursing.
It was one thing to prepare loads of linen and folders of paper for a move, but quite another to prepare people, some senile and with compromised immune systems. Staff worked out a slate of games, movies, and diversions to keep the residents on an even keel right up to the moment of the move, and then started up again immediately on the other end.
As it turns out, nobody could concentrate on puzzles and pastimes.
“They wanted to be right in the limelight, they didn’t want to miss anything,” said Activities Director Mary Agredano-Garcia. “One woman packed months ago, and when we told her the morning of the move that she could be on the first bus, her roommate tried to beat her to the door.”
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Mac Nisbet is a jaunty old man with tufts of hair for eyebrows that arch owl-like when he smiles. He knows precisely how long he and his wife have lived apart.
“She’s been here for three years, two months and two days, and I’ve been here all the days except three – when I had some small operation and couldn’t get back,” Mac said recently.
Maxine sports a shock of white hair and crooked hands, and her eyes are often shut while Mac feeds her, dresses her and strokes her cheek as he reads. She doesn’t speak and sometimes doesn’t recognize her own children, says Mac. But when folks from any of the four different visiting churches come to sing, she joins in on every hymn. He takes care of her almost the entire day, leaving before it gets too dark for him to drive. It can be a difficult life, says Mac, who tries to play a half-dozen holes of golf in the morning just to have some kind of personal life.
“But as long as she’s here, I’m coming. That’s all there is to it,” said Mac steadfastly.
Mac knows everyone at the nursing home. He jokes with the nurses, inquires after the residents, and was completely attuned to the rhythms and pace of life at the old building off Southside. He’ll miss the old building, though the new facility has larger rooms, a 61-inch TV in the rec room and even motion-activated drinking fountains.
“The only thing I can say against it is that it doesn’t have the charm that this building has,” said Mac.
He’ll miss the way he could take Maxine on a tour by pushing her in a large rectangle that centered on an open garden patio. He’ll miss what he calls “the exotic trees” that grow out back and the beautiful rose garden, part of which will eventually be moved to the new place.
He’s not the only one who will miss the old building with the institutional mint-green interior.
“I’m really sad, this is my second home,” said Lucy Borovich, an eight-year resident who once published a newspaper about life at Southside, on one of her final days at the old place. “It just feels like an old-fashioned Victorian Home, every room you go into there’s plenty of light.”
Despite moving to a facility with all the modern conveniences, even staff members like Agredano-Garcia said they would miss Southside. She was born there in the days it was the county hospital.
“To me, it’s really hard because I have a lot of roots in this building,” says Agredano-Garcia, a 10-year Southside veteran. “When I had to leave the building, I’m the one that fell apart.”
The residents understood.
“They were giving me hugs and saying, ‘It’s all right honey, we’ll take care of you.'”
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Southside Convalescent Hospital has been a continuous medical facility since it was built in the 1930s to replace a turn-of-the century county hospital that burned. Since the 1930s it has seen ‘pneumotherapy’ conquer tuberculosis in its TB wing, the eradication of polio, as well as the births, injuries and deaths that make up the daily work of community medicine.
Soon after Hazel Hawkins Hospital was built on Sunset Drive in 1962, Southside was converted into a convalescent hospital, known as a ‘skilled nursing facility.’ In 1976 the recreation room was added, and a dozen years ago Max Ley donated a magnificent German organ.
Every Tuesday and Friday retired music teacher Jody Larson leavened the mood for 45 minutes by playing a seamless medley of old tunes on the ample Technics organ in the recreation room.
“It’s a real bright spot,” says Mac Nisbet, who used to dance with the nurses and an occasional resident during the organ concerts. The dancing brought out a jealous streak in Maxine, who put the kibosh on Mac’s flights one day.
“She put her arm across me and said to the lady I was dancing with, ‘He’s mine,'” laughs Mac.
The organ made the move to the new facility, and Larson didn’t skip a beat in his twice-weekly visits. Thanks to the new sound system, Larson’s renditions of “I am Thine O Lord” and “Anchors Away” can be piped into every room. He hasn’t figured out how do that yet; he’s still dwelling on how much better the new place is.
“The only thing holding that old building up were the termites holding hands,” he said.
Larson is a colorful dresser with a spruce haircut, tortoise shell glasses and nimble fingers. At Southside, Larson played in the recreation room, which had low ceilings and was crowded by years of accumulated recreation room bric-a-brac. The new recreation room has two glass walls and skylights, so it’s very bright. It’s also very loud, since it doubles as the dining room, the clanging state-of-the-art kitchen sounds echo loudly, competing with the organ music.
But what hasn’t changed is the close presence of one of Larson’s biggest fans, Andrea Ames, who pulls as close as she can to the organ to watch the finger work and sing along.
“Why, 40 or 50 years ago I sang in Jody’s choir,” says Ames, recalling Larson’s stint as a reserve choir director at United Methodist Church. She hums along to a few tunes while admiring Larson’s peddle work.
Ames is 94. Her skin is wrinkled and her hair is white. Like many of the residents, she sometimes meets the quickness of nurses and visitors with a look of befuddlement. But she isn’t befuddled, she knows what’s going on, and when she speaks she says measured, considerate, kind things. Ames suffers only from old age, which makes it hard for her to get around, but has done little damage to her memory.
Ames was raised, married and had two children in San Benito County. She grew up in Tres Pinos and passed Southside Hospital in a Model-T on her way to school every day. She lived on a farm, where her father worked in the orchard, made cheese, and hung paper to make ends meet.
As a grown woman, she devoted a lot of her life’s energy to her church, but found time to teach pottery and sewing and lead Girl Scouts. Her husband died seven years ago when, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, he stopped eating. Two and a half years ago she found she could no longer take care of herself and signed into Southside. But she isn’t ready to concede very much to age.
“I know some people who are really old, both mentally and physically,” she says. “In a way, I don’t feel I’m old.”
She points out that all of her teeth are her own, and that she’s still able to knit baby hats. She doesn’t sit and stare out the window, she goes in for the singing, the movies, the exercises, and holds her own at the recreation room table reserved for people with the sharpest minds, known as the Golden Girls.
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The Tuesday morning of the move Ames’ possessions were in a plastic bag in the hallway, lined up with everyone else’s stuff. Her knitting tools, a talking photo album from her family, some of her grandchildren’s toys that had fallen behind the TV, and a folder of documents that included the words to a humorous song written about the long-awaited move to the new building sung at a roast for Jody Larson.
We’ve been working on the building, all the livelong years,
We’ve been working on the building, just to pass along more pills.
Don’t you hear the call lights blowin’, rise up residents.
Don’t you hear nurse Anna shouting, “Jody play your horn!”
By 9 a.m. Jan. 7 the call lights for the move were finally blowin’, considerably later than the original May 2002 deadline.
Dozens of extra volunteers from Hazel Hawkins were on hand to get everyone to the front hall, where they waited for buses. Bedridden patients were carefully moved in ambulances by EMTs, while the more ambulatory residents were bundled up against the cold morning air that rushed through the constantly swinging front door. Nurses with clipboards and two-way radios worked their way through the phalanx of wheelchairs, while buses from San Benito County Express and Jovenes de Antaño idled out front, waiting for the word to start.
Months of preparation and anticipation came down to this scene.
“It’s going to be quite interesting,” said Ames as she waited.
Mac Nisbet arrived and immediately began bantering with the nurses. Cheerfully, he made one last check of Maxine’s room, then wheeled his wife out to the Nova filled with her belongings. With help he put her in the front seat and drove off for the hotel-like entrance of the new facility, where a small army was ready to help.
The moving-day scene at the William and Inez Mabie Skilled Nursing Facility was like an Hawaiian airport. As seniors rolled off the buses, they were wheeled into a spacious reception room and enthusiastically greeted, registered, and rolled toward their rooms. Along the way they passed piles of linen that had to be sorted, men in blue coveralls peering into utility closets with flashlights, clusters of nurses trying to set up their stations for lunchtime medications, and other residents excitedly taking in the new digs.
Andrea Ames took it all in with measured enthusiasm. Down the hallway she looked one way at the view through the floor-length windows, the western sky and the greening mountains, then turned her head to take in the new recreation/dining room.
Like all the residents, Ames kept her old roommate. Mrs. Chesnut was about the only familiar thing Ames saw. Instead of a giant room painted mint green, an aged bed and no furnishings to speak of, Andrea was met with a large cabinet with drawers in her cream-colored room, hangers, a place for her own television, and around the corner a gleaming toilet designed to meet modern-day handicap access requirements. She also has a brand new bed that’s easy to enter from both sides – one she can operate herself.
“I used to have to call someone to tilt it,” said Ames.
**
Because of the limited wheelchair space, it took many trips, but by 11:45 a.m. the last resident was carefully delivered.
“I think the move went phenomenally well,” said Hazel Hawkins’ Frankie Muñoz, who filled seven disposable cameras with pictures of the move. “The months of preparation that it took to coordinate this move paid off. Everything went off as planned.”
A week later life at the new facility has become more routine. The linens have been put away, none of the residents suffered relocation trauma – a polite way of saying no one died from the stress of the ordeal. Landscapers and the heating guys are putting the finishing touches on the place. Though the details are coming together, some residents aren’t getting the overall picture.
“A lot of them feel like this is a motel, a very nice motel,” said Agredano-Garcia.
One woman insists that her son will be back any minute, stating that he’s simply gone for a swim in the hotel pool.
The reception area, the wide hallways, the carpeted halls do conspire to give the interior the appearance of a hotel. At $245-265 a day, it’s pricier than your average hotel, but still the same rate as Southside. The kitchen is better than most.
“I’ve worked in restaurants that served 500 meals a day that didn’t have this kind of kitchen,” said Tim Dudgeon, Food Production Supervisor. “This is state-of-the-art.”
The Mabie Center has 57 licensed long-term care beds, which, coupled with the ultimate 74-bed capacity of Northside, which the hospital rescued from SunBridge Care Center’s bankruptcy, meets the state mandates. According to California standards a county must provide 31 beds per 1,000 residents over the age of 65, which in San Benito County means 131 beds.
The San Benito Health Care District raised $1.4 million in total individual donations, $1 million of that coming from the Mabie Family Trust. The other $7.6 million needed was paid for by Hospital District funds. It makes it a community project.
**
Mac took Maxine on a wheeled tour of her new home when they arrived, though she kept her eyes tightly shut, as usual. Across the door from her room is a door onto a patio still being landscaped, and around the corner is another door to a backyard patio. Using a magnifying glass he reads a plaque affixed to the entrance to Maxine’s room.
“This room made possible by the generous donation of Laura Botelho and the Laurence Cain Family in Memory of Herman Botelho.”
Mac took it all in, figuring he could show Maxine on another day – one not quite so overwhelming.
A week-and-a-half later, even Maxine seems to be alert and happy in her new home.
“The first few mornings I’d bring her out of the room, and she had a big smile on her face and was waving to people,” said Mac. “She was expressing herself quite well for a change.”
