Alvarez/NewsPatricia Henry holds up photos of her
mother, Verda Henry, who died in from bedsores in 2007.

Verda Henry, a 73-year-old life-long Bronx resident, entered a Westchester County nursing home in 2005 after she fell and injured her arm, thinking she would receive therapy and be home in a month.
Two years later, after repeated denied requests to go home, the grandmother of 15 died in the New Rochelle nursing home, partially because of a horrific, infected bedsore, according to her family and court records.

Henry's daughter, Patricia, filed a lawsuit against the Sutton Park Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation soon after her mother's death in August 2007 in Bronx Supreme Court, and last week filed a suit against South Shore Medical Center across the street from the nursing home.

Patricia Henry said she and her children visited her normally active mother every day at Sutton Park, often for eight hours.

"There would be a nurse and she would run between floors and they had no time," Henry said. "Nobody checks on her. Nobody feeds her. Every time we asked to take her home there was a reason we couldn't."

Verda Henry - who was a foster mother, baby-sitter for her great-grandchildren, family chef and cashier at the Eastchester Senior Center until she fell - soon became so weak she was immobile.
One day, Patricia Henry went to change her mother's gown and noticed the bedsore, already in an advanced stage, over her mother's tail bone.

Within days the sore was infected and she heard her mother's last words -
screams - as doctors scraped at blackened skin. "You could put your whole hand down in her back," she said. "You could see the bones and spinal cord. It was like raw meat. Mommy screamed until she couldn't scream no more."

An administrator at the home said it could not immediately comment on the case.
South Shore Medical Center did not return a call for comment.

Bedsores, or pressure ulcers, are lesions caused by unrelieved pressure on the skin. They are largely preventable by making sure a patient is regularly moved or turned every two hours, but are also often fatal once infected.

James Kapralos, Patricia Henry's lawyer who specializes in nursing home and bedsore cases, said there is no system wide recordkeeping of bedsores, so that patients or families comparing nursing homes can make informed decisions.

Henry said she wants justice for her mother, who died a painful death becauseof a negligent system.

"I'm sorry I saw it, but I'm glad I saw it," Henry said.
"They weren't telling us how bad it was and my mother couldn't tell me anymore."