My mother is in a Nursing Home. I visit her every week. My Grandmother was in a Nursing Home. I visited her frequently. My great grandmother was in a Nursing Home and as a child I remember visiting often. Women in my family live to their nineties. I will not end up in a Nursing home.
Make sure
you're prepared way in advance with enduring power of attorney and guardianship all organised just in case with EXPLICIT instructions about what you want and do not want to happen etc.
It is the unexpected that can get in the way of your wishes. Having everything organised can stop you worrying about it later as happened with an aunt of mine.
BTW - of 3 aunts, last one living had her 99th birthday on 11 Nov, another lived to 100 2/3rds and one to 99.
Number 3 revealed to us (shockingly) when we were doing our annual European visits something we found disturbing.
She came up to me with a very conspiratorial look on her face and whispered;
"I'm a bit worried. I take down the curtains each week and wash them.
Do you think the neighbours will notice if I start doing it fortnightly?"
Her ceilings were very high, more than 13 foot (over 4 metres). She got out her large step ladder and climbed up to the last step and unhooked them.
She was 93 when she asked me this.
My response was that her neighbours wouldn't feel quite so bad that they only took their curtains down to wash maybe once a year.
The next year when we visited - she had totally changed. Her confidence was gone and now walked at a snail's pace with a walking stick. Previously only I could keep up with her on the way to a local park to feed the squirrels.
It turned out that towards the end of the previous winter she'd reached out for her water glass and fell out of bed. She hit her head on the way down and was knocked unconscious. She woke up some time later near frozen and it was still dark so she called out as loud as she could but the person who lived in the upstairs on her house (separate entrance) was unexpectedly away.
It took her forever to regain some strength and get up. She spent some time sitting in her bed before she felt up to going to see a doctor. Luckily no real physical damage but her confidence was totally gone. She hadn't told anyone about it as
she feared they would force her to go into a nursing home.
I made a few suggestions about things that could be done to improve her safety/well being and she did everything but didn't like the idea of the alarm pendant - "I've never worn jewellery and I'm not starting now!"
She finally moved into a very nice nursing home that was a converted manor house about 15 months before she died unexpectedly in January this year - 2 days after we visited for the day.
She chose the nursing home and the room with a view of the garden and squirrels nest.
" (AFF doesn't use the actual one) its 2015 "Word of the Year" I'm not too optimistic about the continuity of language standards.
