An 89-year-old Alzheimer's patient could be kicked out of the facility she's lived in for six months in a battle over whether she should be sedated to help her sleep at night.
Ellen Elliot's condition is advanced, and there's much she can't recall.
She's unaware of the battle between her family and the St. Jude's Nursing Home where she lives over whether she should receive sleeping pills.
"It's very common to this disease that they have these very confused wake-sleep cycles," Ellen's daughter Heather Elliot explained.
But that's no reason to medicate her, Heather says.
"I think it's a chemical restraint, that's what I think this is. In the absence of having staff to look after mom at night, they want to restrain her medically."
As Ellen's legal representative, Heather can refuse the pills and has, for fear of side effects and certain it's what her mother would want.
But now, Heather says she been told that unless her mother starts taking the pills, she will be evicted on June 25.
Chris Norman, administrator at St. Jude's, says that's not true, and insists that staffing is not an issue.
"There's a misunderstanding about eviction. We're not legally allowed to evict people -- that is not within the law -- so we were looking at alternatives," Norman said.
A letter to the family spells out those alternatives, which include hospitalization or moving in with family members.
But Heather says she worries that any move would only aggravate her mother's condition, and that her home would not be safe.
"I would like to have her die in peace, without having to have medications in her that would obviously dull her cognition," she said.
With a report from CTV British Columbia's Sarah Galashan
