Dementia
All The Things You Didn’t Think About
And the ones you don’t even know how to pray for
Here’s something you don’t think about. Every elder care facility you enter, even the mostly staffed and very, but hopefully not prohibitively, expensive ones, smell like pee.
Are you in your prime? Old but denying it? Going about your day, trying to get to retirement? Are you moving about by your own power, making your own decisions about what to eat and what pajamas to wear? You’re busy, I get it. There will be time later to think about all those things you don’t want to think about.
Or maybe you are starting to think about those things but then realize you’d rather not, until you have to.
I never thought about the pee smell. I had been in nursing homes and care facilities and hospitals, but until I was standing in the foyer of my mom’s memory care facility, I didn’t think about pee and how hard it becomes to control and how eventually it’s everywhere all the time.
I think about it now because I have to ring a doorbell and wait for a staffer to punch in a code to open the door. When your loved one goes into dementia care, the door to the facility is locked and alarmed, because the residents, even though many of them don’t remember who they are or where…
