NO amount of money is worth the constant vigilance needed to care for a dementia sufferer in their home. They get “Sundowner’s Syndrome” and come alive at night, ie, putting their shoes into the lit oven, turning on burners and forgetting what for, talking out loud as if its the middle of the day… You would have no peace day or night caring for them. Thats why there are round the clock staff at Alzheimer’s units. Bless them all, they cant help it, but its a terrible disease and is demanding of anyone caring for them.
But of course I dont know the woman and there are different degrees of dementia. “Pleasantly Confused” is a far cry from “Combative and Out of Contact with Reality”. Being bitten on the boob while trying to bathe someone isnt cool.
The only case where it might be fair is if you can be there but sleeping during those 12 hours. That is, if you’re there “in case” and to handle stuff in the middle of the night, but could be out during the day.
Even then you’d need occasional relief of some kind, unless you never leave home for a weekend or something.
I worked in a group home during college for room and board, whist working another job for cash and attending school. Being unable to really get away from the job, 'cause you always have to come home to it even if you leave, is incredibly stressful. I wouldn’t recommend that for anyone on any kind of long-term basis no matter what the pay. Love is about the only thing that would get someone through it, and caregivers still need a lot of caregiving theselves dealing with that kind of stress.
In my area there is a shortage of nursing homes which have special units for the memory impaired. The personnel has to be trained specifically to deal with that particular population. You don’t want somebody with dementia mixing with the regular nursing home population. It places an undue burden on an already overworked staff, and chances are the LO [loved one] will probably be overmedicated so as not to cause a ruckus in the daily course of events.
You also have to wait for those particular slots to open. I started looking for places midway through my mother’s tenure with the adult day care. I was placed on waiting lists and couldn’t be given any specific day or timeline as to when a slot would open (yes, that means somebody passes – ergo, open slot). I’d say it was maybe a year before we got a phone call, and I was given maybe 2-3 days to get her clothes and paperwork together before bringing her there.
I’m not pointing this toward you specifically, but it’s so easy for people to say “Oh, put them in a home”. You don’t realize until it happens that no, it’s not easy to do such, especially when there’s a shortage of places catering to the memory impaired. It’s also not easy if you don’t have the finances to hire in-home help.
My Girl Scout troop has a partnership with a memory loss home. The doors are double locked and there is a fence and a locked gate around the house. The kitchen is kept locked, the residents don’t go ther. I don’t know if the residents are locked into their rooms at night (we are only there for Christmas carols and to plant their flowerbeds in the Spring) but I suspect so. It’s amusingly demanding and draining, even just for the few hours a year we spend with them.
Although I’m not a nurse, I sometimes post on a nursing board, and someone asked if any NH employees had ever had a “dump & dash”. Only one did; one day, a middle-aged man wheeled his elderly father into the lobby with a suitcase and some papers, and then ran out the door and down the street. I don’t think the father had Alzheimer’s, but the son just couldn’t take care of him any more and didn’t know what else to do. :eek:
“Granny dumping” has always been a big problem in hospitals (this is one reason why Medicare is such a butt about getting people out of the hospital) and I’ve heard that it’s not uncommon for parents who have disabled or chronically ill children to simply not come pick them up from a hospital admission. I do know that if you think adult nursing home residents don’t have visitors, you should see what happens at a pediatric facility. Someone on another board whose son had to live in one until they could arrange for home care (which has been a never-ending boondoggle too) said that out of the 90 or so kids who lived there, maybe 10 of them had visitors of any kind, and added, “Some of the parents dropped off their precious children, and never even called to see how they were doing.”
But I guess we can’t judge people like this. My mother worked with a woman who had a grandchild in a facility; she visited him but his parents did not because it was just too painful for them. And I knew a woman whose son had the most severe form of autism and had lived in a state facility for many years. She too did not visit him, but his father (from whom she was divorced) did and kept her updated on how he was doing. BTW, not only did she say that having a disabled child was not the cause of her divorce but actually delayed it, we can’t blame vaccines or environmental toxins for this because he’d be in his 60s now, and she herself died several years ago at the age of 86. Her ex had a son from his second marriage who, at the time she told me this, was in his late 20s and was working on a Ph.D. but had never had a job and probably never would because he just didn’t have the social skills to get or keep one.
Oh, heck, when my brother was a teenager, he had very severe behavior problems and I really think the only reason our parents didn’t try a “dump and dash” was because they wouldn’t have been able to get him into or out of the car.
There was a son who did such to his mother when my mother was in the NH. The son’s mother was only in the early Alzheimer’s stage – she had some confusion, but she could still do most or all of her ADLs, she could still follow a conversation to an extent, and she was still aware of her surroundings. In other words, she had no business being there. The story going around was the son “dumped” her because she lived alone and he did a lot of travel for his job and there was nobody else who could look after her.
It was sad. The woman knew full and well where she was, and the staff made her the honorary welcome/social committee chairperson. She would check in on every resident to say hi and what-have-you, and she’d report back to the nurse if there was anything seriously amiss. I’d like to think she and my mother would have been friends had my mother been able to coherently converse.
I know a woman who has a severely disabled daughter. She (the woman) volunteers at the regional children’s hospital and could tell you very similar stories :shudder:
As I say, one has ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA about any of this until it happens to somebody in their family. It’s easy to spout off and say what you think you would do in such a situation, but thinking what you’d do and what you’d actually do when faced with such are two totally different things.
Having worked as a Home Health Aide, I agree that this is a terrible deal for all involved. I think other posters have covered all the reasons.
ZipperJJ
Nursing homes range from hell holes you see on Sixty Minutes undercover reports, to wonderful places to live. In my experience, most places fall in the middle. The workers would never actively mistreat a patient- BUT there are often not enough staff members and they pull long shifts.
