Never work in a nursing home.
This is just fucking sad
Dementia is some of the darkest shit I’ve seen. A perpetual horror film that changes based on the stimuli they can’t explain, a hospital they can’t identify or escape with staff who are trained to lie to and redirect them, no sense of coherent identity or even age so they might be a 6 year-old waiting for their dead mother to pick them up from school.
Let’s hope we can prevent that in the future. Looks like we are close to a Parkinson’s vaccine.
:jesus-christ:
I don’t know how much of a hot take this is, but this kind of shit is why every country should have some laws / system in place to allow for peaceful euthanasia. Nobody should have to just suffer like that until they die.
Totally agree. Dementia, MS, ALS, and cancer are all things I’ve seen the end stages of along with things like being locked in from a stroke. It’s such a degrading way to go even if you could afford my $7000/mo nursing home and the right workers were on shift that day. The diseases strip them of everything until they’re staring at empty walls like a cat under a porch. If they do try to kill themselves, that can be just as painful and failing will put them in the same bed in worse condition. Spending that $7000/mo wrecks the families who they leave behind and seeing their parent in that state leaves them with a warped perception of who that person was. Sometimes their grief turns psychotic and they want grandma to live even when “grandma” died a decade ago and there’s just the body whose every function is micromanaged. There’s no dignity in that and it’s culturally normalised to benefit the for-profit industry around it. The right to die is the highest mercy medicine can give when we’ve reached the current limits of our abilities. It’s the patient’s decision alone, but withholding it is morally insane to me.
There was a time where even Catholic doctors would, when a person entered the final stage, just take the limiter off the morphine drip.
It had its flaws, but your personal physician/palliative care specialist should be able to be given legal power to end your suffering, should you become unable to.
The fact is most people who die dehydrate to death.
there is nothing, and I mean nothing in this world that I’m more afraid of than Alzheimer’s… it’s an absolutely fucking awful disease
Cancer slightly wins out because I can’t get over the existential horror of it being a potentiality any time a cell is damaged or replicates, but dementia to me is a cancer of the soul. It’s one of those conditions where if I’m diagnosed and physically capable I’m walking from the neurologist’s office to the roof. For every patient that seemed blissfully unaware of their condition, there were five who lived in abject terror of their own dying brain. Going through that for an indeterminate amount of years is something nobody except fascists deserve.
:deeper-sadness:
