Recently, my Mom (87; Alzheimer's; lives with my sister) spent a week in a nursing home, as a kind of trial run. When my sister and brother-in-law went to pick her up, they got out into the parking lot, and brother-in-law asked her how she liked staying there.
"I didn't stay here", she replied, a little huffy. "I've never SEEN this place before."
Man oh man. An entire week, she had just left the place, and she had no memory of it at all.
That Alzheimer's is some weird shit.
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4 comments:
Narnia?
When we took my dad for his trial run we told him it was a Ramada hotel. His room faced the parking lot and he wanted his car. And he was amazed they made him shower at the hotel. It went downhill from there.
The mother of a friend of mine is in a nursing home and insists she is being tortured and deprived of food. In fact, she calls it "Auschwitz", although the closest she ever got was a trip to England in the 1950s. And every time my friend walks in unannounced, she finds the attendants friendly and her mother engaged in something that involves neither starvation nor mistreatment.
The dementia stuff is messed up.
Becs, I guess that's pretty common - and I think sometimes the olds make shit up just to get attention.
But if you take a bunch of undereducated people making eight bucks an hour and expect them to take care of a bunch of cranky crazy incontinent old people, yeah, shit's gonna happen. The problem is, there ain't a whole lot of alternatives.
fmcetc., I'm sorry about your dad. I think my mom is already past the point of being able to question anything - she just goes along. And then forgets about it thirty seconds later, so that's a plus.
and becs, yeah, it's messed up all right. For a while, my mom was telling stories about the people who live in my sister's poolhouse. ("They just had a baby! A little boy!") NOBODY lives in my sister's poolhouse. It was kind of spooky. And annoying. I felt like saying, "What the f*ck is WRONG with you, mom?" Except ... I know what's wrong. Shit.
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