Dear friends,

Can you please give me some advice regarding this situation?

Last week, I took my best friend (80 years old) to the hospital after she suffered from a heart attack. Since then, I have been visiting her everyday. But today, I tried to go visit her...(she was expecting me) and a nurse said she has an "order from her family to not allow me or any members of my family to visit her anymore".

My friend does not have any close family only distant cousins. Now, these cousins are trying to prevent her from seeing any of her friends because they're scared we'll take over her will. Are these cousins allowed to stop her from seeing friends she wants to see?

I know for sure that the doctor has not disallowed visits and my friend is completely capable of deciding for herself. They are clearly abusing her rights. But is it possible, that her family has some special rights over her friends (even though she doesn't like her family)?

Thanks for any advice - I'm worried I may never see her again...

Welcome in HBA the short answer unfortunately is yes they can bar visitation from non family members.
Maybe you can speak to whoever is barring your visit and ask them to make an exception for you since you are the one that brought her in.
Theres nothing you can legally do with her Will unless she makes changes to it herself I dont understand why they have this fear its unfounded.

Heres the other thing if she is still lucid/coherent (Is she?) If she is she can speak to the staff and negate this order herself.
If she doesnt like this family of hers then she needs to see her lawyer and get someone other than her family to carry her DPOA (or whatever the legal procedure is in your state)in the event she becomes incapacitated.

Dear HBA, This is a fight that goes on many times. Legal though it might be, it makes little sense, in a rational caregiving way. I go NUTS and Shame to people who would deny a friend access to a person in such circumstance without cause.

Still, do they have some reasonable cause?

Under such conditions, it would be rare a will could be changed. But, who if any one has her POA or DPOA? If such legal capacity has been assigned by her or by the court, I don't know if you have any recourse.

That would be the person to address for acceptions to the rule, just so you could keep company with this person that you seem to love.

Unfortunately, they CAN do this. Selfish, greedy people tend to judge other people's motivations according to what is in their own wicked hearts.

Have you tried contacting the cousins directly, in a non threatening way? If all they know about you is what their relative has told them, there's no telling what misunderstanding might have resulted.

For example, if she's a little disoriented -- hospital stays tend to do this to them -- and/or peeved at them, she might have threatened to call you to check her out of the place or be misquoting something you said to her. Or she might have expressed that you'd been kind to her, so she wanted to give you something and they got paranoid about it.

We've had a few of these types of understandings re our LO.