As a child I had a newspaper route that included a local ALF. A lot of the residents were kind of cranky and liked to bitch about how superior my predecessor had been, supposedly bringing the papers an hour earlier, not rolling them too tightly, etc., and many were incredibly sweet, saving up their rubber bands because they knew we had to buy our own or baking me cookies. I loved to hear their stories and spend a little time with them, and would sometimes hang out longer on weekends to visit. The ALF was beautiful, with several floors of individual apartments surrounding a lovely courtyard.
Sometimes two, three, or four papers would pile up untouched on the windowsill. Maybe they had gone out of town for a bit and would want to catch up when they got back.
Often though, there would be a pink notice on my paper bundle one day and my heart would sink in dread. Attached to the ALF was a nursing home, and when a resident was not doing well and had to be moved, I’d be informed of their new room number. Most of the these customers were prepaid months in advance, so even though they were now in no condition to read a newspaper, I still had to deliver it. I’d place the folded paper on the bed next to their feet, careful not to wake the shell that once held my friend.
Eventually I’d find a neatly made bed, awaiting the next death.
I left in tears at least once a month and have no intention of ever getting old.
If I knew anyone in a nursing home, I’d visit, and sometimes I consider volunteering with my dog, but I’d probably end up unable to go out of town ever for fear of disappointing people who expected us to show up, plus it would likely be so depressing I’d be making my own life rather crappy, so I haven’t been to one of those places in a while.
Sigh, yet another zombie being revived.
hermespan, this was your first post, welcome to the SDMB and all that. But if you check the dates on the thread you’ll see it’s very old, and folks that posted in it are very unlikely to respond.
And yet not old enough for a nursing home.
A little different angle.
My Mom is 85. And is having health issues of course. Owns a little home that she loves. My Wife and I and Mom looked at a number of facilities for her final days/years. Nothing that she could afford came close to how comfy she is at home.
A nice nursing home is $$$$. And I understand why. We unfortunately don’t have an extra million to use. Seriously.
It’s tough, and I worry.
For x-mas we bought her a medical alert system. I did all the research and am paying the fees.
I live 2 hours away, and am trying to visit her more. Once a month at this time, it usually involves an overnight stay. We email every day, call once a week. I don’t think that my Mom would even like more than that. It would be intrusive, and we all still have our lives.
So what if it’s a zombie thread? We still have the same problems with how we treat our elderly. Doesn’t seem like we’ve made any progress in nine years. Certainly a topic worth re-visiting over and over.
My side of the family, we die quick and clean for the most part. The wife’s side is where I’ve gotten to see nursing homes. Who visits and how much looks a lot to depend on the level of care the person needs - what kind of unit they are in. Fairly aware and able to interact at least somewhat and you have all ages and relationships from toddler relatives to assorted neighbors and friends from church or where-ever. Once it gets to the lock-down unit stage, its basically children (and more often than not older children in say their 40s and up) and/or surviving spouses. “The kids” (younger relatives) may come by for a short visit a few times a year (Easter and Christmas) but not weekly or even monthly. Sometimes it depends on the patient; I visited my aged aunt in the nursing home more often than some of her children and I lived 350 miles away. But she was always a lot nicer to me than she was most of her kids.
Why gets into a lot of things from person to person. Seeing someone you really love and care for die an inch at a time is tough. No matter how good a facility is, the sights and sounds and smells can be tough. I don’t fault those who don’t visit but I’m more willing to volunteer and help (in addition to visiting) now than I was when this was all theory to me.
I’d rather volunteer to do neither, but if you held me at gunpoint and made me choose one, I’d choose reading out bingo numbers.
To put a relative in a semi-private nursing home in Oregon, it would cost me between $52,000 and $100,000 a year. Check out what it would cost in your state.
My wife’s ninety-something grandmother is in a nursing home in central Florida. We would visit more often, but we’re in Maryland, 800 miles away. When we visit, we usually bring the Firebug, who’s 7 these days.
It’s a depressing place to visit. There’s little natural light inside, practically all the residents I see have Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia. There are always residents sitting in the hall in wheelchairs, and it’s evident that they can’t carry on a normal conversation. When people talk about ‘warehousing’ the elderly in nursing homes, well, here it is.
Grandma-mama wound up in the nursing home a year ago after a fall. She could have regained the ability to walk with the aid of a walker if she’d gotten a reasonable amount of physical therapy at the time, but she didn’t, and now it’s pretty clear that that window has closed.
One gets the feeling that they regard a dementia patient with mobility to be more of a problem than a dementia patient without mobility. But dementia or no, it would have improved the quality of her life greatly if she’d been able to walk down the hall to the common room on her own, and socialize with the other residents. Now, she is wherever they put her.
She has practically no space to call her own. Her semi-private room is barely wide enough for the two beds, just enough room to squeeze by on the wall side of either bed, and just enough room in between for visitors to squeeze in a few guest chairs. No room for even a thin set of shelves to put photos or other memorabilia on. When you’re in your eighties or your nineties, and you suddenly go from your own house, where you’re surrounded by the personal effects of a long life, to a place like this where you can have almost nothing with you from that life - hell, it hurts me to see it, and I’m not the one living with it. What - they couldn’t have built the building four feet wider, so that each room could have a one-foot-deep set of shelves against each wall?
But we’re eight hundred miles away, and there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it. My wife’s parents are in pretty poor health themselves, so they aren’t in a position to fight that battle either, even though they’re local.
I don’t know what the solution is, but the situation’s pretty damn depressing.
Two things about the twenty- and thirty-something grandkids:
-
They may be two moves away from Grandma in the nursing home. Their parents may have moved away from their parents a generation ago, and the twentysomethings may be starting off careers in a new city themselves with little money. Traveling to see Grandma may mean a tradeoff with seeing their parents or maintaining relationships with friends they grew up with.
-
Up to a certain age, you piggyback your relationships with grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, etc. on your parents’ relationships with your grandparents, uncles, and aunts. You visit them when your parents visit them. This is especially true if you don’t live in the same cities as these relatives. If you’re not in the habit of visiting them on your own before they go into the nursing home (which would be unsurprising), it’s going to be that much harder to begin to do so once they’re there.
You can say they should do it anyway, but that’s human nature.
There’s a third thing that I think is worth commenting on, as a public policy issue.
I think we’re about 15 years away from a major wave of Alzheimer’s and senior dementia.
Are we going to try to plan for this as a nation, or will it just be every family for itself, as it’s been so far? (Which has been working out so well, and is bound to work even better when a lot more elderly people enter the same already-crowded system.)
But think about it: the first wave of Baby Boomers will be in their mid-80s in 15 years. And presumably the same proportion of them will have Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia as all the 1920s babies that are in the nursing homes now. Only there’s a lot more of them, so that same proportion of dementia-afflicted seniors is going to be a lot more people.
There should be a shitload of money right now going into figuring out how to minimize dementia in old people. Is it happening? Hell if I know. But according to Terry Pratchett (from his Wikipedia page):
Maybe funding has improved since then, but given the Great Recession and its effect on governmental budgets in general, it’s not the way to bet, I would think.
And if we don’t find the means to cure or mitigate dementia, we’re gonna have to warehouse a hell of a lot more dementia patients than we do now. Swell.
Call it the Y2030 problem.
Altho this is a re-awakened zombie thread, I’d be interested to know the outcome of the OP’s research, if s/he is still around these boards.
My experience with nursing homes was nil until my mother was sent to one. She’d been sick from cancer re-occurring and in a lot of pain, and unable to walk. After dad and a neighbor had to help her up from the floor a couple of times, the doctors said she needed to go there. The very first time I went there to visit her, I rounded the corner of her room only to find 4-5 nurses heaving her up from the floor. I asked if I should help or leave or come back in a few min - they advised the latter.
She shared a room with another woman who we did not know. There was a curtain drawn between them and they each had a TV and dresser. The other woman had the window, so mom was just laying there, in pain, and watching TV for days. They tried physical therapy, but she was too far gone. The day she died, I went to see her one last time and say goodbye - again in the shared room. I could not imagine what the other woman was thinking.
I have never seen such a depressing place, for all the reasons expressed above. People in gowns walking the walls hanging onto the handrail, the smell of urinary tract infections, people sitting in wheelchairs with nothing at all to do, the heat. The nursing staff was incredible - they all had positive attitudes and were very helpful and honest with me. I asked the nurse in charge of the wing more about this place, as I was not at all experienced with this at that time: I asked point-blank of people ever got out of here - she told me “no”.
I asked myself if this is where we all end up. I guess not if we die earlier.
Altho traumatized by my one and only experience with a nursing home, I like the idea of volunteering; I can write letters and maybe bring my dog. I will look into it.
Dr. Atul Gawande’s new book “Being Mortal” addresses the problems of how we currently warehouse the elderly.
I was a CNA for several years, and could not work in nursing homes; they were terribly confining, constricting, and depressing. Adult people were not allowed to drink, forced to eat bland food, not allowed to wear high heels, not allowed to leave when they want or eat what they want, all in the name of “safety”. All because they happened to be old.
Apparently it’s not got any better, which makes me sad.
I hope that I die quickly, like most of my family does. If I were warehoused like that, I’d go mad.
Not that that matters in the slightest.
Thanks to all for contributing to this revived thread.
I write from BC, Canada. While in the USA you might have the opposite problem of here, in BC we have mostly monopoly health care. Be careful what you wish for with Obamacare unless you have options and there is no coercion! I get most of my medical care in second and third world countries because I can walk in and see a specialist or get an MRI in hours, not months. Mostly India and Vietnam. I feel for those who do not have the money or situation to travel so they are stuck with taking a bus to USA ($$$). Or waiting six months to get an operation. I know a Canadian guy who was so fed up getting his wife into to see the necessary specialist here in BC that he flew her to Germany. Fast and free medical service, even as a tourist. Canada has neither a free market nor successful socialism. It’s a broken system.
**However, in Canada noone is going to die on the street from cancer or an auto accident. **Problem is chronic health problems health care. I am appaled by the lack of choices in Canada. My friends in Malaysia, Switzerland, UK, Australia, etc - they can use the state-sponsored public system or use the private one. It’s two-tier almost everywhere in the world except Eire and Canada. Even communist China has more choices than Canada. There was a court case in Quebec province several years ago where a Supreme Court Judge ruled that if the state cannot offer timely health care it has to open up to competition (‘private care’? - quite the opposite really, no wonder ‘private’ schools in Uk are called ‘public’). The bureacrats in the provinces have stonewalled. Health care is so much of a right in Canada that we all get the same low level of care.
Could have something to do with the fact that the IMF was going to downgrade our credit status as a nation unless we cut our social services (no mention of how the majority of our national debt is interest to private banks. Unlike your Federal Reserve deciding US monetary policy, the Bank of Canada is still offically a national bank, yet it borrows money into existence from Royal Bank of Canada etc - PRIVATE banks charging interest!)
Rant about centraly planned health care system over.
The ‘Nursing home’ where my mum stays is a mixed bag…
Pluses
- ‘universal’: in theory, non one is turned away.
- affordable: My mum pays about 70% of her income for everything (nursing care, care aides, food, accommodation). Some people are paying per month 3K+, others 1K. Because she has a union pension plus all the other limited income sources topped up courtesy of her self and employer contributions, plus income and sales taxes over the years, she pays about 2K
- Free meds: Because she had a union job she has extended health care insurance so all her drugs are paid except the first $250 a year
- Good nurses: There are some excellent staff, really dedicated, hard-working and kind
- Active: While facilities vary from place to place, here they have a good recreation staff and programs,
- Some private rooms: She managed to get a private room after waiting 8 months sharing in a double with a lady who drove her round the bend
- Freedom: I am welcome to visit at any time, take her out etc. No one ever come to her room and tells me to go home.
- OK: Some other BC facilities are more crowded and a lot more depressing than here
- No hassle: To bring in a paid companion that is.
- Social worker and Care Director accessible: for complaints and commendations
Minuses
- Over capacity: severe shortage of beds, I mean both to get in and to get a private room
- Food marginal: institutional food (comes from the hospital next door)
- Family not involved: While the union and management have a lot of power, there is zero power from the residents and their families. We get asked about cookbooks and other trivialities instead of being invited to particpate in important matters
- Understaffed: Poor staff-resident ratio
- No doctor: Just one who comes in every Thursday, And now he is having his job taken over by a ‘nurse practitioner’
- Anonymous: no uniforms, no badges: Drives me crazy, I like a military type operation with clearly identified roles and responsibilities
- No supervisors: Union doesn’t like it for one. Instead they have ‘job descriptions’. Maybe management is trying to save money too
- Insufficient bathing: Only one real shower/bath per week. However a sponge bath type quicky offered every night
- No soverignty: While officially it is up to family, in reality the doctor and nurses do whatever like think is best.
- No guarantees: Although the fees are fixed (raising ocassionally actrually) the management will commit to nothing - minimum staff-resident ratio etc.
- Entirely allopathic: No altenative health care: Extremely pharamceutical oriented.
- No extras: No physiotherapy, massage etc. And it is ilegal for me to pay extra unless I bring in an outsider
- Volunteers restricted: Union says they cannot give care!
- Secret: We have to sign a form that we won’t tell about anything we see, e.g. to media. I question the legality of this.
Exactly so. My nephew visits when his dad does.
But my argument stands - married people with kids (even if their ‘kids’ have grown up) put a LOT more money, time and attention to the ‘;downline’ than the ‘upline’ Breeding tsrategy in the DNA I suppose. There is no self-interest to be served by caring for the elderly, which is why I believe that libertarian political philosphy is incomplete. It only works in a society of volunteerism, and that is usually based on ethics, primarily from religion.
Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be more compassionate and honest to kill our far gone demented. Horrible thing to say, though I suspect the eugenics movement of the Nazis and ‘Planned Parenthood’ would agree with that strategy. Basically that’s what the medical establishment does in Canada - withdrawal of care equivalent to Innuit sending their elders on ice flow (sounds like fiction to me) The doctor and directors are pushing us to not have her treated for any terminal illnesses that might develop. Seems like first degree murder to me.
To me, this is less a financial and medical problemand more a social one.
I am not pointing fingers. I did not work hard for decades to build up capital, buy a house and then have enough assets to hire a care aide to look after my mum while I went to work. That is why my motehr is in a nursing home. I am not just poor, but very selfish. I think this describes much of US residents too.
One sad part, where I will point a finger though is this: the State will pay strangers to take care of the elderly, but not family. Does that make sense? I suppose that opens a whole can of worms about whether housewives and mothers should be paid, who is going to foot the bill etc.
Astacey wrote a decade ago: “Anyone can call a nursing home and ask about volunteer opportunities.”
There are periodic volunteer group visits at the facility where my mum is. Hwoever, it is always a sort of ‘mob volunteer’. Why I don’t know, but there will be zero for weeks then twenty all at once. I would like to see several volunteers around all the time.
I do not make any friends speaking my mind on this matter, but I have said to the Busines Manager that perhaps it is time to decide whether BC can afford union labour in our government funded nursing homes. Because of union wages the cleaners have all been contracted out which causes a whole new set of problems.
Curious observation: Most family visitors belong to two groups…
-
wife
-
unmarried child
NOT friend, brother, husband (even though most residents are female), sister or grand-child
Also, because the ‘nursing homes’ here in BC, Canada are marginal (compared to the ideal anyway) the only people who seem truly happy and well looked after are those who have regular visitors who are advocates and monitors on their behalf. There is essentially an unspoken two-levels care - those who have supplemenatry care givers and family visitors almost daily and those who have been warehoused.
Keep in mind I am no great example. I go travelling for 3-6 months at a time. So I pay somneone to go in and keep tabs.
But, considering it more, my mum always said she didn’t want to be a burden, didn’t want to live with her kids. She is not Asian. It’s not our way. This seems to be the best compromise. My challenge is as the unmarried ‘child’ with no dependents and no debt (and currently no job, so lots of free time) I am the logical choice. I don’t even want to live in Canada, instead planning my final expatriation. I live out of a suitcase here when I come back. I can’t afford Canada. But truly, I get tired of the work load. Intellectually I recognize that she wiped my ass for five years so it’s my turn now. But the anxiety is building. I mean, how long is this going to go on for? My siblings contribute almost nothing time and money-wise, except when I am back in Asia when my brother shows up for a 2-hour visit every two or three weeks. I am more in touch with the staff by email and phone even from geezer-rich Tokyo and young generation Indonesia.