 |
| Jane's Residence, facility for Alzheimer's patients |
Carol Forsloff----She lives in a care facility for Alzheimer's patients. Her family lives in various parts of the world and seldom see her. In fact very few visit at all. An 8 x 10 page in a guest book represents all the visitors for the helpless people who live in ways many would worry about placing their parents, but some families don't.
From the outside the Alzheimer's residence looks charming. The halls are wide, and beautiful paintings line the walls. The entryway is tastefully decorated, and one would believe they were visiting an old friend at a fancy apartment building were it not for the locked doors that greet the visitor upon arrival and the need for a code to get in.
Once inside the visitor is surrounded by feelings that mix sadness, fear, worry and amazement that the elderly people who reside in this building near a hillside and fronted by a lovely park could be a place where people spend their final years in isolation, forgotten by friends and family, their possessions often stolen by other patients and their privacy entirely gone.
For the locks are on the outside. The rooms remain unlocked so medical staff can enter at any time. But so can patients, who can molest, steal and hurt other patients by being freely able to enter their rooms.
The life of the Alzheimer patient is a bleak one, in most circumstances, for the middle to ending stages of the disease finds folks unable to function as they once did, remember friends or family or enjoy most of the ordinary things of life. Food is bland, and fresh air comes through windows and occasional guarded walks, with those opportunities lessening as the disease progresses.
It is a disease that offers little mercies, little sunshine, and no hope, as medical staff cluster in packs at the front desk and caregivers move through the rooms to make the beds and tend to other chores.
Like a jail, often windows can be barred. And the staff is vigilant for accidents, injuries, and the sounds of desperate people who no longer understand what they do or why.
That's the real face of Alzheimer's. Not the statistics. Not the mother being cared for by a warm and loving family with assistance given at intervals paid for by those with the means to make things easier. For most people, however, that is not possible, as the expense of caring is beyond the budgets of most families. So that real face is 1/3 of all Americans over the age of 80, with 90% of those individuals without the means to be cared for without public help.
It is the end no one wants, plans for or can manage in a culture where social services are being cut at a time when there is a burgeoning population of the elderly who will eventually need those services and can't get them, as they will be locked up with no place to go.
