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Hello welcome to a rant no one asked for.
We have a really deep problem in the way we talk about care homes.
We have a really deep problem in the way we talk about care homes.
We have a narrative that "old folks homes" are all bad, and that elderly people are abandoned there because no one loves them enough.
You see it everywhere in culture. Lines in everything from comedies to songs to birthday cards about leaving your parents in a home, and the punchline is essentially "Watch yourself or you’ll be abandoned"
When my grandparents were sick, everyone told us how great it was we could keep them at home. Everyone said how much happier they’d be in the community and made comments about families that didn’t care enough to put in the effort we did to avoid a care home.
We’d be in the latter group now. We didn’t keep them at home. My grandfather broke his hip, the equipment he needed to get out of bed was bigger than his bedroom so he had to be moved into a nursing home. To all those people who’d praised us, we’d failed.
They’ve been in that nursing home for over a year now and the thing no one had considered is that the care they get there is better than the care we could get for them at home. A million times better.
That narrative about "keeping them at home"? It says that the nursing home is bad and the home is inherently good and it fails to acknowledge how vital proper care is. It acts like love is enough to make care adequate and it just isn’t.
I love my grandmother more than almost anyone else in the world. But aged 15 after a full day at school with exams a month away was I capable of being a more competent carer than a team of trained qualified nurses? Absolutely fucking not
Now she’s in a nursing home she has 3 hot meals a day, all cooked on premises, plus cakes, biscuits and scones, whatever the kitchen have decided to make that day. All her medication is sorted in advance, and brought at the same time every day.
I took on a lot of those jobs whenever my grandfather wa sin hospital and I did about as well as you can expect a teenager to do. Which is not enough.
I couldn’t sit and talk to her while I cooked because there was only one of me. I couldn’t name her medications to the doctor without checking because I didn’t understand what they were.
We called the other day to speak to her and she couldn’t come to the phone because she was painting. In a class with a teacher. We were barely coping when she was at home and now she has enough care they can provide extra entertainment for her.
I was a child when this all started for us. The effort to keep them at home put a burden on me that shouldn’t ever be placed on a child.
When she went missing at night, I used to check the sides of the bed to see if she’d died. When she wasn’t there, I’d walk around the streets by her house looking for her. When she had pneumonia, I called the ambulance, when he had a blood clot I cleaned it out of their bath.
I’m only saying my part in this but my entire family put their lives on hold to care. There are other things I don’t talk about, not here, not offline, not at all. Because there are things worse than trying to get the blood off the walls.
I wish they’d been in a nursing home ten years ago. Not because I don’t care, not because I wanted to leave them but because I love them, and because I think they’d both be healthier today and happier today.
I don’t think we did anything wrong with trying to keep them home because it felt like the only choice and it was what they wanted but I wish that they and we had known that they could get care that was better, that was gentle and supportive and would have helped them.
"Is shoving your parents in an old folks home good? No." 74 likes.
I can say confidently that my grandparents would both be dead by now if they were still at home.
I can say confidently that my grandparents would both be dead by now if they were still at home.
They are incredibly sick. They both have dementia, my grandfather has almost no speech and he can’t walk. And when they bring a musician in, he sings.
We couldn’t do that at home.
We couldn’t do that at home.
I wonder if this idea that people in care homes have been left, that they are unloved, has anything to do with our government absolutely and fundementally failing care homes during the pandemic.
Stop the narrative that care homes are abandonment, or cruelty. There are bad care homes and abuse, as there is in any sector with vulnerable people, and it should be investigated and taken 100% seriously. It doesn’t make all care homes bad. It doesn’t make care bad.
Part of what spurred this thread was the tweets in the screenshots at the top and part of it was the memory of a carer who had helped us when they were still at home telling us it was wrong we’d put them in a home. Fuck that, fuck her. It was an act of love.
I see my grandparents as often as I can. At the moment in lock down, they Skype almost every day, something they couldn’t have done at home. I bring presents and stories and I don’t have to clean urine off the carpets. I get to be their granddaughter again.
