Death smells of urine not memories... (My Experience of Alzheimer's Disease)

Member Name: thedevilinme

Product:	My Experience of Alzheimer's Disease
Date:	02/07/09 (65 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Keep your mind busy guys

Disadvantages: The indignity of death on the NHS

Death smells of p*ss, as simple as. You come into the world as you go out, in pool of bodily fluids and functions as your torso and organs surrender before your brain, the instructions somewhat confused and ignored. When I go around my mums in the hot summer it's the lingering smell of urine that reminds me my dads gone, not the sun stained photos or gold clubs in the attic. We ripped all the carpets and beds out to get rid of the smell but it's always there on a hot sunny day to remind you what's coming to us all. When dementia strikes they know what things are but not what they are for, the bath the toilet (for number ones and twos) you their prison guard.

When you lose a parent or relative through dementia, or Alzheimer's as the middle-class call it(posh people don't go mad they have 'long illnesses') and most of you will, it's not only very sad for the person you see demise that way but the carers too, me and my mum not quite the same people after it happened. I moved back home for a while to help her with him when he started to throw punches in his confusion and frustration and it's tough to be around d, the dementia my dad had a serious of small strokes that shut down his bodily functions one-by-one. When your dad finally forgets who you are as that part of his brain crystallises and turns into glue and he thinks his mum is still alive and lives just over the back garden fence and he wants to go home for tea you can't help but feel it. At that point you are now his prison guards and his day is spent being devious and planning the escape. Anyone who has been through this will have a little smile at that. They have earned that smile.

I still feel guilty that if we had done more things together he may have had more memories to hold onto to keep it all together. I wasn't close with my dad and he used to whack me with what ever was to hand when I was a kid, a broken man by his early retirement through Type One Diabetes and rolling shifts in hard engineering factories, lashing out because his life was decided once mum had the kids and so the bills to go with. But no one deserves the indignity of dementia.

You can avoid cancer by having a good diet and doing exercise but dementia is a complete bastard. One-in-five of you reading this will get it a variation of it and if you're working-class your chances increase radically if you make it to 75. One-in-three of us will get some sort of dementia over the age of 80. Your retirement is not so rosy guys. The human body is just not designed to live that long and it's a huge financial headache for the Treasury that we do. If you're going to give money to a charity then this should be near the top of the list. Forget your self-indulgent animal causes and those three hundred poverty charities that would do a dam site better if they merged. Drop a few pence in the dementia tin. When you see your old man in the NHS hospital in the private room as the rest of the elderly patients howl away with the same illness on the neighbouring general ward as they too near that stage you only see yourself in that bed. I'm lucky I haven't inherited dad's diabetes and keep very fit to avoid that but I'm not sure I will be able to dodge this bullet, writing our only defence against it to keep the mind active. The worse thing about the condition is there's no real cure and my mum may get it too, so I have to go through this all again. Why the government are holding back on these drugs that ease the symptoms is beyond me. They seem to find enough money for half a million illegal immigrants to stay here by paying for their human rights lawyers. Once you get it you're a drain on the state and no one wants to know you as you have no use to society. The wards are full of cases dumped in hospital because care homes are so expensive and so they have no choice but to effectively cull the elderly once they can't function in their homes.

Once the patient reaches the point of no return (all the beds are full on the ward, the ward sisters priority not to let that happen) the next of kin is given a form to box tick their mum and dad away. The patient is effectively-and legally-starved of the fluids that sustain life and they are left to waste away. It would not surprise me if the nurses nudge up the morphine levels on the drip when the relatives are not around to move things on some. What else can they do to meet those targets? Everyone I know who lost someone this way say they died in the middle of the night, around 3:30am, usually early in the week. We know to well that the nurses are needed elsewhere on Friday and Saturday nights. I guarantee you a few people reading this received the call early Tuesday morning.

If you don't go along with this macabre NHS bureaucracy they give you the option to dump them in the local council care homes that are truly awful places. The stark choice is sell your house to fund the extortionate £600 per week private care home costs or tick the boxes. In my dads case it was the best option as he was too far gone with the strokes. Don't expect the nurses to wipe their asses or feed them on time, either as they know what will happen to your dad eventually and so they too hurry that process along which they see day in day out ion the ward. It's a cruel but necessary factory process and that urine smell is always there in hospitals. If we are lucky 90% of us won't have to go to hospital until the very end, 90% of all the money you pay into the National Health spent on the last six weeks of your life. If you're lucky you will remember the end and the people by your bed.

Because nurses are too proud to wipe asses and mop up piss these days the cheap labour orderlies have the task, those crap jobs the core reason for third world immigration, and treated like those two bodily expulsions if they grumble on minimum wage. Because beds remain dirty and infected with the obvious bugs that creates then we see thirty thousand deaths from MRSA like infections a year. That is a lot guys. The whole smoking ban in public was for just 2000 passive smoking related deaths a year. But you can sue against tobacco companies. Some of these people are elderly like my dad and so the deaths' convenient' for bed blocking issues but it also infects people of all ages and good health who go in for less serious operations and procedures, exposed wounds on the wards sucking in the bugs... The government allowed the MRSA figures to be fiddled to disguise how cheap labour contract cleaners have been driving up infection rates. 20,000 people a year die in hospitals after picking up infections. David Boost, the Coventry city defender who had his leg snapped clean in half by Peter Schmichael, couldn't play again because his wound got infected in the hospital by MRSA and not because of the break.

When you see these articulate people with terminal illness protesting for the right to die, perched atop the steps a the High Court, they don't contemplate that any legal right to die put through the statute will be more about culling old people with dementia and cancer not about the hundred or so people that use the process of the right to die to keep some human rights lawyers in nice cars and, rather ironically, a reason for those protesting to keep living. There's nothing the government would like more than to lift the elderly burden on the National Health, its biggest spend by far. Keep you and your parent's minds active guys as Dementia is rearing up o western society like a spitting cobra full of venom.

Summary: Its coming to your family.