The men and women who put their lives on the line shouldn’t have them placed on hold by a Veterans Administration that kept hundreds in isolation long after the rest of our state emerged from COVID lockdown.
Yet that’s exactly what happened at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Wilkes-Barre, where elderly and ailing vets have been treated more like prisoners of war than heroes worthy of the freedoms they guarded.
It shouldn’t be this way. In fact, official guidance from The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which regulates nursing facilities, states, “the bottom line is visitation must be permitted at all times with very limited and rare exceptions, in accordance with residents’ rights.”
They waited alone in rooms, unvisited by volunteers who are still being kept away. For more than two years, vets at the Wilkes-Barre center were held in isolation, with brief family visits permitted only in the lobby.
Following a public outcry and protests at the facility, the hospital’s executive director lightened some of the restrictions, permitting family visits in limited circumstances. They waived a half-hour time limit for family visits, reopened for visits by friends and now permit VA residents to gather in an outside courtyard.
Which begs the question: how did the VA permit such overbearing restrictions to continue well past the point when other facilities in Pennsylvania and around the country recognized the need for our veterans to have actual human contact?
It’s bureaucracy at its most unfeeling and emotional neglect at its most despicable. We know hospital administrators wanted to keep COVID rates low. Trying to keep them at zero, though, is possibly more dangerous.
That’s what David Huszar says happened to his uncle John, a decorated Vietnam veteran.
“John became so depressed after lockdown that he just went to sleep, and he gave up living,” Huszar told WOLF-TV news. Coupled with high gasoline prices and an 18-county service area across two states, some families found it difficult to make a four-hour drive for a 30-minute, no-contact meeting.
Other VA hospitals like the one in Philadelphia allowed for longer visitations inside of the resident’s rooms months ago.
As an Iraq War veteran myself, I know the importance of family. It’s what you think of day-in, day-out while overseas. You try to remember the faces, the conversations, to feel that connection and your first stop after returning stateside isn’t an empty room. You want to be home.
Many of these heroes can’t be home. They are wounded. Ailing. Elderly. Struggling to maintain their connection with the wider world and hold on to their dignity as time takes its toll. That time shouldn’t be spent in a bureaucratic solitary confinement. They’re asking for family, not the Hanoi Hilton.
The solution here didn’t require legislation. It simply demanded horse sense and common decency. Volunteers say the hospital administration has promised an easing of the Covid lockdown since March. It took protests, public outrage, and a petition signed by 80 health care workers who pointed out that the facility’s restrictions were more onerous than the national guidelines to make at least some of those promises a reality.
In a poignant moment, TV viewers witnessed a telephone conversation with Derbert Dilworth, a U.S. Navy veteran who spoke by phone in a moment that had all the ambience of a call from a hostage.
Dilworth said he had been locked down for over two years. And despite the VA’s jargon-filled explanation and reassurances, Dilbert’s suffering seemed to readily outweigh the risks of giving him a life worth living.
When you sentence a hero to solitary confinement, it crushes the spirit and robs them of hope. COVID is to be taken seriously, not blindly obeyed as some invisible master. We know that COVID can be fatal. So can loneliness. It’s time to show some compassion.
(Stacy Garrity is a retired colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve and treasurer of Pennsylvania. She served multiple tours in Iraq.)
