VANCOUVER -- The COVID-19 outbreak at Burnaby Hospital has now claimed the lives of a dozen people.
War veteran William Robertson, 97, a decorated soldier who served his country for more than six decades, is one of them.
“He was a great guy. I loved him,” his daughter Janice Robertson said in an interview with CTV News. “The military was his whole life.”
But Janice says when he moved into George Derby Centre in Burnaby a few years ago, he seemed to lose a piece of himself.
“In the military his whole life, he ran his own ship… to lose his independence was a really tough thing for him,” she explained.
“He became really, really depressed, suicidal."
She hired a companion to help care for him and says he blossomed.
“She really brought him out of his shell. He loved her. He called her Anna Banana. He really looked forward to spending time with her,” Janice explained.
Then the COVID-19 visitor restrictions came and she says they took a toll on him.
Janice, a registered nurse, says she tried to have his companion granted essential caregiver status, but was denied.
“I said that she was considered essential, that she encouraged him to eat and that he was really depressed when she wasn’t there but they said that wasn’t essential,” Janice says.
And she believes all of this took a heavy toll.
In October, her dad ended up in hospital with sepsis and she was able to visit him in person. But she says she left the hospital heartbroken.
“He had lost a considerable amount of weight. Then when I looked at his mouth, he was missing a tooth,” she said.
“After I saw him, I just cried. I felt that I had really let my father down, that he had been there for me. I felt that that was my role as his daughter and as a nurse to advocate and look out for him.”
Still, her father soldiered on.
He recovered only to suffer a heart attack. He ended up at Burnaby Hospital, where a COVID-19 outbreak would infect 62 patients and 50 staff, including him.
It would prove to be his final battle and he would die days later.
“It took him very, very quickly,” Janice said.
Janice agrees with health officials who say a fire at the hospital contributed to the spread of the virus, but still has questions about how the outbreak began.
“Was it a failure in wearing PPE, what exactly happened there?” she asked.
She also says with care homes understaffed, she doesn’t believe seniors are getting the individual attention they deserve.
“I think everybody becomes task directed and they don’t take a step back and see that is an actual human being,” she said.
Care home workers will be at the front of the line when a vaccine arrives in B.C., but it’s not clear when visitor restrictions might be relaxed in nursing homes.
Janice believes that with proper PPP, there could be safe visits now. She’s urging health officials to give seniors better access to their loved ones because next Christmas might be too late.
“They’re suffering, they’re really suffering,” she said.
