LET: PHOENIX, AZ- On October 10th, a caregiver for an elderly woman dropped her off at an Avondale Police Department (APD) station stating that they were no longer able to care for her.
In a Facebook post, police said they were able to find the woman temporary housing with the help of Community Services and Community Bridges, along with other resources.
What happened in Avondale is not an isolated incident, as experts report seeing more men and women in their elderly years living on the streets. Lisa Glow, CEO for Central Arizona Shelter Services, said in a statement: more
I don’t know what would be worse: living on the street or having 300lb Latrina giving you a sponge baff in a roach infested retirement home.
Yep.
It’s tough to care for an elderly invalid. Not very rewarding either. They’re not gonna get better. They probably don’t even know who you are.
You have to love them to get through.
And have some help. No one can do 24/7/365 elderly care on their own.
And some folks have neither love nor help.
And some have one and not the other.
I’ve seen folks bankrupt themselves and make themselves physically sick trying to pull it off without help. Doesn’t do anyone any good when you get evicted while your in the hospital reading about what a sack of shit you are for leaving your witless mother dirty in a dark, empty house because you can afford nether food nor electricity nor water.
Some folks have money but no love, and hire it done in Mom’s house. You read about these when you see elderly abuse cases where paid “caregivers” leave someone in a nasty diaper in a filthy bed as they steal their life savings.
I’ve been in houses where drug dealing sons rolled around on the floor with police, fighting over drugs while I tried to suction vomit out of Dad’s throat while he’s having a stroke.
I’ve seen nursing homes wbere patients have 4th degree bedsores and overflowing catheter/ colostomy bags because their keepers beat them if they complain.
I’ve seen “assisted living facilities” that leave old folks who burn themselves cooking in pain because the also elderly “attendant” is afraid they’ll get fired if they call someone.
I’ve seen these, and more, from 3 decades ago to today.
And in most, seems to me that they’re probably better off with the police, maybe even in jail.
At least they have rights in jail, and someone is obliged to feed them and get them medical care…
FWIW, they get them on thr other end, too.
About a year into my FD service, we got an edict from the County. Someone passed some law or other that if a woman decided she didn’t want her newborn no more, she could drop it at the nearest fire station and, after a quick check for abuse, leave with no further questions asked, not even her name.
No one ever handed ME one, but it happened.
And this was decades ago. People have gotten LESS moral since then.
…so if someone’s inconvenient, you just dump them, so it seems.
But don’t be surprised if someone returns the favor one day…
Thanks Dry Gulch. I’m now looking forward to my not to distant living arraignments. 🥴
Give her Kamala’s Job.
Who knows, she might speak whatever language JoeTatoe Speaks.
(might just be that we just don’t understand his brilliance)
That’s what the Biden’s, Harris’s, and Pelosi’s want to do to America’a unvaxxed – stop caring for them and drop them off at jail.
Coming soon to a neighborhood near you. Jobs for immigrants will those in charge of the care at those facilities (you infidels soil too many diapers! I keel you!) Sorry Jeff Dunham.
Supernightshade OCTOBER 27, 2021 AT 4:50 PM: Ican attest to the difficulies of caring for an elderly dementia stricken loved one. I lost a good paying job, sold my house to keep her in her home and cared for. I am the man that works in her machine shop. In reality I live in the shop because she doesn’t know who I am most of the time and it frightens her to have me sleep in her house. This wonderful woman cared for me for seventeen years and this is what I do for her now. I hope you don’t get me wrong I know what you are saying, have seen sad things at charities,food banks and clean ups with stranded elderlies.
Supernightshade, I too experienced the same while a FFTR with a large Western city FD. One incident sticks with me from 40 years ago. House was a dump located in the ‘hood. Elderly mom trying to take care of mentally disabled son. He operated at a 1st grade level. Mom had a heart attack and passed away. Only after the neighbors began to smell her were we called. He wouldn’t answer the door so I used a halligan tool to force it. I’ve never seen or smelled anything quite so bad (it was mid summer). We called the coroner who came and got mom. The son wouldn’t leave the kitchen (even with the smell) and kept picking at an ancient pizza on the table and popping chunks into his mouth. He couldn’t understand where mom was. Social services eventually came and got him.
No one cared about her enough to look in on her. They cared even less about the son. Made me sick and sad.
@Huron
You are a good man.
God Bless.
HungJumper OCTOBER 27, 2021 AT 6:13 PM: Did a clean up on a house after the mail man noticed no mail being removed from the house box,looked closer and saw the flies in the window and called for a welfare check. We shop vaced four, five gallon buckets of flies and other bugs from the house and that was the most pleasant part of the job.
As bad as my egg donor could be, I would never have dropped her off at a police station or rest home. As it was, I pretty much took care of her. She passed away at the age of 98 3 weeks ago. She is far better off than we are. /just saying
Better than dropping her in the dumpster behind the 7-11!
Ultimately, we’re all in God’s hands – in the interim in our fellow humans’.
izlamo delenda est …
@Huron – May God bless you for taking care of your mom. I spent the last 10 years taking care of my dad in his own home until his death. One of his and my mom’s biggest fears was being put into a nursing home. As things progressed over the years, I asked my sibling for help (he was retired and lives only 4 hours away). His response was “you just need to put him in a home”. So I did whatever I had to do to keep him in his own home and take care of him around the clock even though it wasn’t easy.
Thankfully, my dad’s mind was pretty good until the last couple of weeks before he died a few months ago at age 90. I still thank God every day for giving me the privilege of being able to take care of my parents at the end of their lives and being able to provide better care for them than they could have gotten anywhere else.
I truly have no regrets because I loved them – and like you, I owed them my love because they had always loved me and cared for me, and raised me the best they knew how. I believe I did the right thing under God’s plan and I am at peace with myself knowing that I did all I could for them which is its own rich reward. I wish you the same sense of peace and reward that I have – I don’t think you’ll ever regret your efforts in taking care of your mom.
I’ll take Latrina for 200, Alex.
Huron
OCTOBER 27, 2021 AT 6:04 PM
Please don’t misconstrue my comment as a condemnation of taking care of an elderly relative. To the contrary, it’s what SHOULD be done, if at all possible. God bless you and Bubba’s Brother if you can pull it off, but not everyone can.
I believe you said you were an FF once too. Guys like you, me, and HungJumper never got invited to see the successes, only the failures, so it is possible to get a little jaded.
I’m helping to take care of my elderly MIL in my house, so I know it a little, but I’m blessed to have a wife to help me, as well as occasional help from her grandkids and her other daughter as well as visits from PT and a nurse for her broken neck as well. I can’t imagine trying to do it with no one but myself, so I salute you that you found a way to yourself.
God bless you, Bubba’s Brother, and all who find a way to protect their loved ones from a “home”, a very noble and worthy goal.
May God strengthen you and all who try, to be equal to the task.
Goldenfoxx
OCTOBER 27, 2021 AT 6:40 PM
And bless you for taking care of someone who, this and other comments you’ve made elswhere, apparently did you wrong through life. I’m sorry for your loss, but I’m sure a reward awaits you in Heaven for your diligence.
God Bless,
SNS
@SNS – thanks for your kind words. After the COVID panic hit, all the nursing homes here were locked down and family members weren’t allowed in at all. So I really was glad that I had been able to keep my dad at home. People I knew with parents in the nursing homes told me that their parents had really gone downhill mentally in a short time from being isolated from their families (other than by phone).
An old lady just a few doors away from my dad’s house didn’t have any children, but her and her late husband had financially prepared for their “old age”. When she got in bad shape including her mind, one of her friends hired a supposed caregiver who was a local woman with a fair reputation. Instead of caring for her, within a few months this caregiver tricked her into signing a power or attorney. The caregiver proceeded to sell off the old lady’s furniture and other belongings including taking out a reverse mortgage on the old lady’s house. By the time she died, there was nothing left as her few remaining relatives came to find out.
A nephew of the old lady told me they looked into prosecuting the caregiver, but were told that since the power of attorney had been signed and no one had contested it at the time, there was really nothing that could be done. The old lady may have agreed to the arrangement as far as anyone could prove (which was extremely doubtful).
I looked into hiring someone to help with my dad, but really didn’t trust the people that I could find. The going rate was $20 and hour or so and they wanted at least 30 hours per week. None of them would do much to help like cook or feed him or do any type of cleaning. They would basically just keep my dad company. My dad was a private person that didn’t like other people “messin’ with him or his stuff”, so he wasn’t much in favor of the idea.
And “home health care” proved to be just another racket to rip off Medicare (at least in my experience). Dad had to be hospitalized for a month a few months prior to his death. One of the “benefits” of medicare was that they would send in “home health care” to help out. The “agency” set him up with four different “aides” to do physical therapy, a nurse to check on him, an occupational therapist and another one. Medicare was charged $227 per visit for each individual.
None of them ever spent more than 20 minutes and none really provided anything of any value – they spent more time filling out the log book for the visit than doing anything to help. And they wanted to schedule visits “on the fly” when it was convenient for them and would pressure me to let them come at times when it wasn’t convenient for us (we already had a daily routine in place). I’m sure they were pressured by their management to do as many appointments as possible every day, and it showed in the way they conducted themselves.
My dad was still sharp enough mentally that after a few days of this, he told the person that was visiting that he was tired of it and he didn’t want any more of it. Dying was a private matter and he didn’t want people that he didn’t know pestering him like they were – he just wanted to be left alone to die in peace – it was between him and God.
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From a guy that knows, death is sometimes mercy all the way around.
Heart breaking shit.
HungJumper
OCTOBER 27, 2021 AT 6:13 PM
“Mom had a heart attack and passed away. Only after the neighbors began to smell her were we called.”
We had something similar, but just a dead elderly lady, no son.
Gal drew up a bath and evidently felt cold, so she set up a space heater pointed at the tub.
Then, as far as we could tell, peacefully died.
This one was discovered by smell too, obviously beyond help. But she still needed to come out of the tub.
Thing is, the still-running space heater basically slow cooked her like a crock pot, making her rotting flesh also very tender. It was impossible to lift her by the limbs because the meat just slid down the bones in an absolute feast for the senses, then she fell back into the fetid water in a nice splash for everyone.
The final solution was to submerge a backboard under her somewhat floaty, bilious form and lift that way. It worked, but then everyone got to enjoy the peeled muscle and exposed bones on the extremities one more time, and you really couldn’t strap this spongy mass down, so the whole thing had to be slid into a fluid containment bag, and thence into a body bag.
Not sure how, or if, they did an autopsy unless they did it with a food processor.
But the worst part is, not only did no one care HOW she died, there was no evidence anyone cared THAT she died.
And that, unfortunately, is not unique to her.
We all will die, this is true.
But how horrible it is to leave nothing behind but the smell, and be missed by none but the flies who impregnated you with their maggots…
Brad
“OCTOBER 27, 2021 AT 10:24 PM
From a guy that knows, death is sometimes mercy all the way around.
Heart breaking shit.”
True.
My wife’s aunt, the last of that generation on her father’s side, died Tuesday at 4 in the morning of a glioblastoma she’d been diagnosed with in May. After losing her ability to walk, sit up, most of her abilty to talk, getting seizures, being unable to swallow, she was a shell of herself when we visiited her last week for the last time at her daughter’s house a couple states away where she lay dying.
She was kind of lucid that last time, and also, we are told, at the end.
She had made her peace with the Lord and was tired of fighting.
She was not only ok with dying.
She welcomed it.
I don’t know what my end will be, but I can only hope I’m as at peace with it as she was with hers.
She will be missed,
But no one who knew her would have wished for her to go on living as she was.
So you can’t always say this, but in her case, death truly WAS for the best…
SNS
We’ll share stories later on. But yes, we’re on the same page. Somedays I’m extremely tired.
I haven’t forgot you or that you’re a cancsr survivor still fightjng hard, Brad, and I still pray for the Lord’s healing for you as well. When someone is ready to go home to the Lord it is a beautiful thing, but a life healed us also a powerful testimony to Him as well, and may He grant you that testimony very soon.
God bless,
SNS