My friend has writenme again:
I am thinking about a conversation I
had with my father the other night.
He feels that no one cares about him.
He wants help. He asked me for help.
Now, there is a rational and cold
approach to his perspective: He is at home.
He is safe. My mother and sister are
there, caring for him. And, in addition,
there is a paid care-giver who works
very hard.
However, that “rational”
perspective is incomplete. He recently experienced three very hard
weeks, when he was largely alone in an institutional setting.
My mother and the
care-giver often visited him—when they could. However, he was
alone at
nights. And, at
night time, he was most unhappy, and tried to leave the institution.
So far as I can
tell, the institution was, to all intents and purposes,
under-staffed.
Moreover, when my
mother attempted to complain to the head of nursing, she was
not allowed to do
so. Her request was met with an unimaginative excuse that the Big
Nurse was not there,
or busy, or whatever. Really, I don't remember what was said,
and it doesn't
matter. My mother's request was ignored and she was put off---as if
her concerns did not matter. But in a meeting with a Social Worker
and an unidentified employee of the Institution, her financial
situation was attended to.
So the institution
was disrespectful to my mother as well as my father. And, it quite
happily took their money—their money,
even if through the mechanism of insurance.
It is impossible to
know whether my father's dislocation in thought would have been worse
even if he never was
imprisoned. However, I believe his isolation for three weeks has damaged him. The question is whether he will recover. At the deepest, most primal level: for three weeks, every night he felt more alone than he's ever felt in his life. Quite an accomplishment for the medical system which John Boehner says is the "best" in the world. After eighty-nine years of life, after trying every day to be honest and help his family, and anyone else he met, he was rewarded with lonely nights in a sterile facility......
In all previous
hospital stays, my mother had accompanied my father. He was most
stressed at night, when he was alone. We know that isolation is
harmful. That's why psychologists say that solitary confinement for
prisoners is torture. The fact that my father is dependent upon the
help of others makes his isolation worse. If he called out at night,
no one answered. Oh, sorry, the institution bragged that they
visited him every twenty minutes.
Yes, I can imagine
what that means. A white-costumed individual pokes his or head in
the door to make sure that the patient is still alive, and then
rushes down the hall to poke their head into another room. That sort
of thing would make me feel like the people involved really cared.
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