[ExI] nursing homes, was RE: NYT: Happiness May Come With Age, Study Says

[spike]

> ...On Behalf Of spike

>... this Alheimers patient who 
> hadn't spoken in a year, moaned as plain as your own voice, 
> "...ooooohhh god that hurts..." ...  That nursing home went out of
business in 1997. 
>  This incident is chapter 1 of 2... spike

Chapter 2 of 2.

I decided to end my temporary employment at the nursing home and take a pay
cut to accept a sub-minimum wage job on campus ($2.65 an hour instead of the
nursing home three bucks.)  The campus job paid less but was a far more
pleasant task, tutoring calculus, physics, chemistry, fortran.  I met my
sweetheart doing this.  We graduated, married, happy years went by.  

Mid 1990s, my wife's grandfather began showing signs of dementia, and
eventually began to wander outdoors at night, so the family decided to move
him into assisted living at... the nursing home from hell.  It wasn't the
very worst one in existence, but it was in that range, the light blue
properties on the old Monopoly board one might say.  He had Medicare and a
Social Security pension, which together would just cover the cost.  He
started in Charley wing, but soon was moved to the Delta wing and started
the long walk.  (Note: Delta is where the Alzheimer's patients are in
lockdown always.  Unlike the other wings where people sit around and
converse to some extent, on Delta, there is very little conversation and
nothing else to do, so the patients just go outdoors in the adjacent
courtyard and walk and walk and walk until they can walk no more.  The
patients on Alpha, Bravo and Charley know this.  They refer to the
terrifying move to Delta wing as starting the long walk.)

The family gathered one weekend to visit her grandfather, who was having a
rare lucid day.  (This was not an accident, but I will omit here the reason
why he was having a lucid day.)  The families are not allowed to see Delta
wing, where I once worked.  When the Delta families come to visit, the staff
fetches the patient up to the front lobby.  So we were visiting there and
grandpa said "Oh, I had dinner with the *nicest* family, they have a
sawmill, lotsa kids, really nice folks."  We were puzzled by that comment,
so I slipped away and went on back to Delta, buzzed in.  When the teenage
minimum wager answered, I said "Hi, former staffer, may I go back to the
courtyard?  I know the way."  She allowed, I went back.  Thru the window I
saw something they didn't have when I worked there, a big screen projection
TV, which was trendy spendy high-endy for 1994.  Some kind soul had recorded
a bunch of Walton's episodes, trimmed out the commercials and some of the
tedious goodnight John Boy, goodnight Mary Ellens, go to hell Uncle Fester,
etc.  The nursing home played the Waltons tape continuously, a 1930s setting
which was the environment of youth for many of those elderly patients.  The
patients slipped into that alternate reality effortlessly.

So these two chapters have me thinking of improvements, big improvements,
that can be made to end-game care for the elderly: mechanically facilitated
solid waste removal and continuous virtual reality, guided by user
preference, a bit like Second Life, only retro instead of futuristic.  I
hope one of ours, or someone, can create a company to develop this kind of
technology, benefit humanity, and most importantly, make a buttload of
money.

spike