Past time to go

What a sad thing it is when it is time to go yet all the signs are ignored.
Many times it will be a vascular dementia or an Alzheimers type dementia causing judgement errors. This is where the Medical system has to intervene. It is never done lightly.
Today I had two clients both in this circumstance.

The first client lives in one of the most desirable areas in our lovely resort area.
The home is a multi million dollar property. She knows this part.
She does not quite remember the difference between her Mother and herself or her husband and her father.
She at least has no desire to cook but she has a strong desire to wander up and down the road.
She shows effects from a vascular dementia (The underlying cause of vascular dementia is an interruption of blood flow to the brain.)
She is not quite a danger to herself yet neither is she safe. Shades of grey.

The second client lives in low-income housing sponsered by one of the local benevolent societies. She and her husband were among the first tenants there. Over a year ago I had the sad task of reporting finding her cooking brown sugar and wondering why it wouldnt thicken. She thought it was porridge. Then she had a terrible cough that would not go away and a great deal of incontinence. She was placed in Intermediate Care and at the very last moment she declined to go. This happened four times.

In the last month something has gone terribly awry. One Nurse arrived to find the client rubbing her arm. After some coaxing she got her to remove her robe and found half her back and arm completely raw. Noone knows quite what happened but the dressing is huge.
Then she left her stove on two nights in a row - the third day she put her hand on the burner.
Another dressing.

Pills untaken, fire risk.... she has to go this time.
She no longer can decline.
I wish she would have gone last year at the beginning of the great slide down.
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Deterioration of kindness and consideration is the most insidious blight on our mental environment - when our rights as consumers overshadow our responsibilities to each other as human beings. - Roxanne Bielskis

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I believe that the horrifying deterioration in the ethical conduct of people today stems from the mechanization and dehumanization of our lives - the disastrous by-product of the scientific and technical mentality. Nostra culpa. Man grows cold faster than the planet he inhabits.
Albert Einstein