Whose responsibility is this?
I’m so mad I’m turning to you.
The lady I’m talking about survived the holocaust, for crying out loud, and now she’s in a system that is taking over her life once again.
She was not in a determent camp. She was a Kinder child, a system where they took German children away from their parents, and shipped them to a safe country. She ended up in England, and she still has friends there. She was a well-known mathematician and highly respected.
Until now.
Now she is in a fine assistant care facility, has her own apartment and 24- hour care. She has MS, which isn’t life-threatening, and she has short-term memory loss. She can be controlling and a pain in the ass sometimes, but that is no reason to kill her.
She’s paying big bucks for care. And caring for her is the job of her caregivers.
Quasi nurses that come in for a few minutes when she is really complaining have recommended that she be placed on hospice care.
Yes, she has a wound that isn’t healing from sitting on her walker (There are fine wound-care clinics), and she has itches that drive her and others crazy. The itching could be from the MS or a side effect of the oxycodone that she is taking (plus, I don’t know what else).
The nurse (not an RN) who recommended she go on Hospice said, “Oh, no, we won’t give morphine unless the patient is in pain.”
The principal person here, the patient, the lady from Germany, has stated that she would rather have pain than being whacked out of her mind.
Well, they did place her on Hospice, and not one day went by, but she was given Morphine, Methadone, plus an anti-psychotic drug. (She is not psychotic.) This is standard Hospice procedure.
Hospice, I thought, was end-of-life help for people in pain.
She has no terminal illness. She is old.
This is an abuse of the system.
Morphine can inhibit breathing—which is often what kills people eventually. Now caregivers can administer it in liquid form after the patient can no longer swallow.
They even made up her bed in the way they do when they judge that the patient is not getting out of it. (The strange bed-making is so they can change the sheets while the person is in bed.)
The lady doesn’t understand—she trusts those in authority. Those in authority whispered behind her back that they were going to recommend Hospice care, and she asked what they were talking about. Yet they say to her face that “You are our number one priority, and we’re going to take good care of you.” They say they have talked with her but have not made her understand. But she is/was lucid enough to make decisions about her own life. She has a Power of Attorney, but that person is a hired professional, not her family. Yesterday someone unplugged her phone, so she couldn’t talk with what little family she has because she was incoherent.
This is criminal. This is chemical restraint. This is elder abuse.
Once upon a time, a son in a cold Northern cold country decided his father was ready to be placed on the ice flow to die.
Being somewhat sympathetic, the son gave his father a blanket.
The father cut it in half and gave one-half back to the son.
“But, Father, why would you do this? “asked the son. “You need the blanket.”
The father spent the rest of his days with his son.