Joseph Riggs
Jun 2026
My dad a 20 year military retired combat veteran was sent here after discharge from the hospital when he started suffering suddenly from undiagnosed stage 4 melanoma liver cancer. He literally went from almost no symptoms to terminal in the course of two weeks. Now that I painted the picture of how he got to cottonwood let's talk about the conditions. 1. The place has poor ventilation and stinks of urine and feces most days. 2. The nursing staff was not very credible and seemed poorly trained, and were mostly foreign with heavy accents making it hard to understand the exact measures that were being taken to insure my dad's comfort. 3. While under their care for two weeks he went down hill extremely fast. I went everyday to check on him and visit, and after about the first week and a half I noticed he he was suddenly confused very lethargic and not eating much. They increased his pain meds and on the second to the last day there put him on an iv drip for dehydration an low blood pressure. 4.. On his last day there i showed up after work and I found him completely out of it in bed talking to himself with his eyes closed and breathing shallow rapid breaths. The kind that come when you are near death, I know because I have seen it before. He opened his eyes and said he was thirsty so I reached over to his water thermos only to find it was empty because he had spilled his water. Someone had come put a towel on the water put the lid back on the cup and left him there. I was in there for 10 mins at this point and nobody had come. 5. After seeing all this I demanded he be sent to the hospital and they said OK but they wanted to talk to their nurse practitioner by phone. They came back and said the nurse practitioner said they could start morphine yo give him comfort. I said excuse me, he is not on hospice yet and he is going to the hospital. 6. After ariving at the er I found out my dad was so dehydrated they had to give him four bags of fluids fast trying to get his blood pressure back up but it didn't work so they had to give him meds to get it up. He also had sepsis from his catheter so bad they had to give him mass amounts of antibiotics, yes sepsis well past the infection point all undetected by cottonwood. He was dying of dehydration and sepsis not cancer at this point. I told the er nurses and doctors , and they were horrified by what I was telling them and promptly made a report. 7. Make no mistake folks most places with these services are like this and are trying to make money off the system and return the bare minimum in services to the patient. Good luck finding a good place with morals, but I can tell you for sure cottonwood is not one of them. Remember be and advocate for your loved ones, and keep in mind they work for us not the other way around.
