Nice Business Plug

Dementia is a dreadful condition for a loved one to attempt to manage. My mother suffered this and I wish that I had known, THEN, what I do, NOW.

She doesn't "hate" you, at all. She's not who she is - dementia is the brain shutting down and misfiring, and it is very, very challenging for a loved one to understand that the person with dementia isn't acting out on purpose to annoy or disrupt the household. They can't help it. They have no more control over what they say and do than the non-patient has control over peristalsis after eating. It just is what it is, and the challenge for us is to learn that it isn't personal - we cannot turn their decline into something personal against us. To believe anything other than that is to indulge in our own personal issues that we may harbor for the dementia patient.

Nursing home? Please. They are warehouses for the dying and that's about it. Patients in nursing homes do not receive loving care - they are simply stored in a bed in a room until such time as they expire. Their needs cannot possibly be met by the underpaid and overworked aids that are charged with caring for them. The nurse(s) on duty have entirely too many patients to attend to, too many medications to keep track of, too many bed sores to hide, and they are also overworked and underpaid for what they do on a daily basis.

If I could turn back the hands of time with the knowledge that I have, today, I would never, ever, EVER have placed my mother in a nursing home. I would have quit my job, gotten into counseling, and learned how to separate my mother's dreadful decline from the person that I had known all of my life. She became belligerent and aggressive before she finally slipped into a coma and passed. She didn't know. She would never have wanted to end her life in that way or to be a burden on anyone, and she had articulated this wish a number of times. In the nursing home, she was neglected, malnourished, overmedicated, and suffered horrible abuse. She wound up with 5 broken ribs and had been left to lie in the floor after she had taken a fall - I found her like that. She was also lying in her own excrement that had apparently been days old when I called an ambulance to take my mother to the emergency room and the Nursing Director begged me to let her get some intravenous Antibiotics into her system before the ambulance came to collect her.

Nice business plug for Downsvale Nursing Home written by "...a Head Nurse..." If you had an ounce of ethics, you would speak truthfully about what really happens to the elderly patients in a nursing home and counsel people to do whatever they must in order to avoid that final decision. Nursing homes are horrible places and the worst possible option for the patient. Tweet