An escape from the last resort - nursing homes for the elderly

Whole Earth Review, Fall, 1990 by Katharine M. Butterworth

Rochester, Michigan

January 6, 1990

Dear Sir,

I am sending you the enclosed article on the recommendation of my daughter who is a regular subscriber to the Whole Earth Review. She told me that your latest issue was on the subject of the extraordinary increase in the world population of the young.

I thought that you might be doing a companion issue on the population changes in my end of the continuum. I just turned 91 the day after Christmas. journalists write about the need for things to improve in taking care of the old. However articles written for us old folks rend toward the saccharine.

This article was turned down by another publication as being too realistic and frank for both the homes" that take care of us and the "inmates," If this is too long it can always be cut.

Best wishes,

Katharine M. Butterworth

YOUNG FAMILIES who have the responsibility of caring for old people find it hard to tuck them in the chimney corner, mainly because there is no longer a chimney corner in which to tuck them.

In reading a bulletin from my college, it proudly lists some ten graduates who had lived to be a hundred, BUT every one of them is in a nursing home. A nursing home used to be a halfway house between hospital and going home. Now too often it is the permanent home, the last resort for a family desperate to handle an elderly invalid. To date nursing homes are expensive, and to receive any financial aid from the government, such as "medicare," one must be destitute, but that is another story.

My personal knowledge of nursing homes is three, two for my husband, one for myself. My husband and I had had a good and healthy life when in the mid-eighties he became ill, a bladder operation, need for a permanent catheter, the infection sometimes affecting his mind. I became ill, had to enter a hospital myself, and our children insisted he go into a nursing home.

Shortly, when I recovered and was home, I visited him. He had been given a small room opposite a noisy laundry room, and a woman patient next door was moaning all night. He said he was going to jump out the window, and I told him he was on the ground floor and could walk out. I sat with him in the dining room with three men who didn't talk; they had Alzheimer's disease. The trays were metal, and noisy when handed out. He was served a huge sausage, the kind he particularly disliked, no knife, and a little dish of stewed fruit with a limp piece of cake on top. No fruit juice or water, liquids which he was supposed to have plenty of. In addition he was tied in a wheelchair making it difficult for him to reach the table. It depressed both of us.

At a conference of head nurses and an accountant, asking me to sign many papers to make my husband's acceptance permanent plus a $3000.00 deposit in case we would get behind in our payments, I burst out, "He's coming home." It had been ten days too long, this signing away a person's life to what seemed like purgatory. It had started out as a solution to a problem but it turned into a nightmare. We would both be home in our apartment, and manage some way and die together.

Our help at home was erratic and our children again insisted my husband be put in a second nursing home. He was needing more care and often he would wander at night, waking me up. Once he fell out of bed at two a. m. which entailed my calling the police as I could not lift him or help him to climb back in.

This second "home" was much more elegant, Georgian-style architecture, trees, garden, the room itself large and pleasant, but help here was short and he often was left in bed most of the morning. The dining room had none of the clatter of metal trays and the food was attractively served with variety, each person was seated at an individual table or if a wheelchair was necessary there was a tray. It seemed quietly civilized until one patient shoved his tray with everything from soup to dessert and it shot with a crash across the floor, necessitating that some poor soul clean up the mess. The patients looked normal but, one could guess, were often not.

Then we found Sandy and a nursing home was no longer necessary. Sandy was with us part-time for over a year until my husband died. She was going to college, wanted to earn extra money, and we paid her above the minimum. Never have I known a more dedicated, hard-working, cheerful, intelligent young girl. She liked and still likes old people, and some day she plans to run her own nursing home, and may her dream come true. She was ideal for us, permitting my husband to stay home where he was happiest. She was strong enough to give him a tub bath for example, and because she was cheerfully persuasive there was little friction, and I began to relax. He died at home which in itself was a comforting end.

Six months later I came down with pneumonia, and my son and daughter-in-law took me to emergency in the nearby hospital. Slowly I recovered physically. There were many complications, X-rays, medicines, a speech therapist and psychologist (which confused me, but apparently I had had a slight stroke which I didn't realize until later). The best medicine was my roommate, Ruth, a rollicking, cheerful woman who was seriously ill, but everyone who came to our room, cleaning woman, nurse or doctor, left smiling.