Johann Hari writes an eloquent and impassioned summary of his grandmothers final years spent in care homes in Britain.
My grandmother did not believe in moaning about anything. So when I first visited her in that first home, and found her in a wheelchair staring into space, with a cold and foul pie in front of her, she said everything was fine. Although homes are supposed to lay on activities every day, I hardly ever saw any happening. There would be rows of people in metal chairs looking into the middle distance, and occasionally a surly member of staff would give them a balloon to pat to each other. Yet if you stopped and spoke to these people, they were lucid – and agonisingly bored
It gets worse:
She had been saying for months that it was far too painful, but the “carers” told her she wouldn’t get any food if she didn’t do it and it was “necessary”. “I’m not walking,” she said, crying. “It’s agony.” The staff were clucking and telling her she was “misbehaving”, as if she was a toddler.
This was so out of character that I immediately knew something was wrong, and I insisted they call a doctor. They hummed and hahed and only agreed when I got angry. She was finally taken to hospital and X-rayed. The doctors found that her legs could no longer support her weight – she was a big woman – and had suffered severe stress fractures and breakages that must have been there for months. They had been forcing her to walk on broken legs.
The shocking truth is that his grandmothers story is not unique.It terrifies me to think too much about the content of his article. What sort of society are we becoming when we treat our elderly so badly? Johann nails it when he says:
we are punishing the people who saved the world from the Nazis. Didn’t my grandmother – and yours – deserve a better ending to her story than this?
And therin lies our own fates. Food for thought. Curious? Link to read this article in The Independent
Source: The Independent
