Waiting Room Which You Don"t Want to Leave
I saw Bertha every time when I was going to school.
Her face was covered with wrinkles and eyes lost their color long time ago.
She looked forward but I doubt if she could see anything.
Her shaking hands held the handles of the wheelchair.
She forgot her name; she did not remember how to smile.
There were some old pictures on the wall near her bed.
On one of them there was a young girl full of life flirting with the man in the uniform.
He was holding cigar and tried to look serious.
On another picture the same girl was kissing and hugging a little boy with the chubby cheeks and adorable smile.
On the last picture, which was standing alone on her night table, there was a middle-aged man dressed in a suit.
I recognized the boy by the same chubby cheeks; second chin joined them probably not long ago.
The man's smile was still as attractive as it was on the old yellow picture with torn edges.
In the background I saw tall buildings and thousand of people running around, preoccupied with their own problems, stressed and tired, always in a hurry to get somewhere, meet somebody, be on time, keeping their phones close to their ears to make sure that very important phone calls were not missed, all questions were answered, all thing were done like tomorrow would never happen.
Bertha lived in the nursing home and when the sun was slowly moving up in the morning, the nurse used to take her outside, so she could breathe and see the cars passing by.
Some other residents are not that lucky.
They are hidden from the world were kids are running and laughing, where women give birth to the babies and students wait for the summer to go to the beach.
They arrived to their final destination, to the waiting room where they all came to wait to die.
As the parents of America's baby boomers move further into old age, we see more nursing homes opening their doors to the patients.
6.
4 % of people older than 75 live in the nursing homes all over United States.
The average annual cost for a semiprivate room in a nursing home is nearly $67,000, reports the MetLife Mature Market Institute.
In parts of the country, it's much higher.
Still, if a senior citizen exhausts all her assets, Medicaid will cover her nursing-home care.
Not so with other types of long-term care.
Except in isolated instances, Medicaid doesn't cover assisted living or home-based health care.
That means families often have to pay those costs.
The average cost for an assisted-living facility was $35,616 a year in 2006, according to the MetLife Mature Market Institute.
The average cost for a home health aide is $19 an hour.
That is not very easy to pay for many people and that is why most of the caregivers pick nursing homes as the only option available.
There are a lot of great nursing homes.
They have great staff, physicians are dedicated and helpful, but don't fool ourselves.
It is an institution where people loose their personal identity and give up a lot of their individualism to join the system and get cared for in a group setting, where things happen at certain times, and schedules are adhered to, and you have your room, or you're with your roommate, and you have the nursing station in the middle and the long hall.
Here all your life full of tragedies, disappointments, love, and losses is written on a several pages of paper and consists of medication lists and doctors orders.
It feels like a hospital.
It is a hospital.
In the United States, as well as other industrialized nations, nursing homes are increasingly becoming the place of care and site of death.
In both England and Australia, one in five persons now dies in a nursing home.
In the United States, currently, one in four persons die in a nursing home, and in six US states, the rate is more than one in three.
By 2040, nearly one in two persons will die in a nursing home.
Studies by the National Institute of Health confirm that the rate for severely depressed elderly in nursing homes is up to 40% - more than 14 times the national average for this age group.
This news does not really surprise me.
Even when we visit nursing home, we feel disturbed, and we try to escape to the sunlight as soon as possible from the long corridors with the smell of medications mixed with the smell of death, from the rooms where you see people with feeding tubes, catheters, diapers, where concentration of pain, sickness and despair is so high that you can hardly breathe.
Some time ago I stopped in the living room where my parents were watching some Old Russian movie.
I looked at the screen where large family was getting ready for dinner.
Kids were running around, mother was screaming at them, father was silently reading newspaper while sipping water from the bottle.
Grandma was sitting in the wheelchair holding a big fat cat.
One of the kids was trying to hide behind her chair and she started to smile and talk to him in a soft voice.
She was in the middle of the crowd, being a part of the family, feeling that she was alive, that there were so many things that she needed to see in her life while her grandkids were growing that leaving this world was not an option.
Why cannot we as a society provide a way to keep our old people in their own homes as long as possible? Why cannot we make sure that our grandparents stay as long as possible in familiar and comfortable surroundings that provide greater control over their daily lives, reinforce a sense of independence and self esteem that is important to their mental and physical health? Why should we live with constant feeling of guilt when we leave our loved ones in the nursing homes? If government can pay more than $60,000 a year for the patient in the nursing home, I am sure they can come up with some alternative ways to help family members to take care of the elderly people in their own homes as long as possible.
AARP estimates that unpaid caregivers, who contribute financially, spend an average of $2,400 a year on care.
Those who put in more than 40 hours a week spend much more: an average of $3,888 of their own money each year, AARP says.
The typical unpaid caregiver is a 46-year-old woman who works outside the home while taking care of a relative, according to AARP.
That burden forces her to cut the hours she works at her regular job by about 41%, causing her salary and benefits to fall sharply.
It does not take a long time for these overstressed and tired women to give up and leave their relatives in the nursing home.
By paying to the nursing homes and not paying for the alternative way of living, government supports the idea of moving old people to the nursing homes as soon as possible.
Who will benefit from this? Old people? I doubt so.
Nobody living in a nursing home wants to be there.
Young people? Growing up without interaction with elderly leave us without understanding of aging.
The situation in California is even worse than in other states.
California is forcing thousands of people into nursing homes who may not actually need to be there.
At a time when 35 other states are opting to cover "assisted living" care, which feels less like a medical institution and more like home, California picks up only the costlier tab for nursing homes.
Experts say that from 20 to 70 percent of nursing home residents could be well cared for in assisted living, board-and-care homes or at home with aides, at two-thirds of the cost of nursing homes.
Most elderly people whose minds and bodies are damaged by Alzheimer's and Parkinson's don't really require medical care.
They need help with feeding, bathing, grooming, toileting.
They need personal attention, but instead they found themselves in the rooms with two or three other patients , breathing air bristled with the scent of disinfectant, strapped to the wheelchairs instead of walking, losing weight and get constantly scared by the new people who surround them.
State is spending more than $2 billion per year on them in the nursing homes instead of spending much less for the homier options where residents feel safe, where they have bedrooms, kitchen tables, porches, pets and privacy, where kids visit them much more often and every single thing remind them of the life they had and all the people they met during their long journey.
I haven't seen Bertha for some time.
I don't want to ask, I know the answer.
The residents in the nursing home come and go without saying good-bye.
The only things that remind me about her are pictures.
They are still on the wall.
The young ambitious and full of energy girl on one of the pictures looks sad today.
I hope there is no connections in time and she does not understand what would happen to her in sixty years, I hope she will keep looking at the handsome young man on the picture who would be her love for the next fifty years without hesitation that the future is brilliant, that the death does not exist, and that at the end she will just stay in the waiting room for a little bit to enter a new world where pain and suffering of aging disappear forever.
Her face was covered with wrinkles and eyes lost their color long time ago.
She looked forward but I doubt if she could see anything.
Her shaking hands held the handles of the wheelchair.
She forgot her name; she did not remember how to smile.
There were some old pictures on the wall near her bed.
On one of them there was a young girl full of life flirting with the man in the uniform.
He was holding cigar and tried to look serious.
On another picture the same girl was kissing and hugging a little boy with the chubby cheeks and adorable smile.
On the last picture, which was standing alone on her night table, there was a middle-aged man dressed in a suit.
I recognized the boy by the same chubby cheeks; second chin joined them probably not long ago.
The man's smile was still as attractive as it was on the old yellow picture with torn edges.
In the background I saw tall buildings and thousand of people running around, preoccupied with their own problems, stressed and tired, always in a hurry to get somewhere, meet somebody, be on time, keeping their phones close to their ears to make sure that very important phone calls were not missed, all questions were answered, all thing were done like tomorrow would never happen.
Bertha lived in the nursing home and when the sun was slowly moving up in the morning, the nurse used to take her outside, so she could breathe and see the cars passing by.
Some other residents are not that lucky.
They are hidden from the world were kids are running and laughing, where women give birth to the babies and students wait for the summer to go to the beach.
They arrived to their final destination, to the waiting room where they all came to wait to die.
As the parents of America's baby boomers move further into old age, we see more nursing homes opening their doors to the patients.
6.
4 % of people older than 75 live in the nursing homes all over United States.
The average annual cost for a semiprivate room in a nursing home is nearly $67,000, reports the MetLife Mature Market Institute.
In parts of the country, it's much higher.
Still, if a senior citizen exhausts all her assets, Medicaid will cover her nursing-home care.
Not so with other types of long-term care.
Except in isolated instances, Medicaid doesn't cover assisted living or home-based health care.
That means families often have to pay those costs.
The average cost for an assisted-living facility was $35,616 a year in 2006, according to the MetLife Mature Market Institute.
The average cost for a home health aide is $19 an hour.
That is not very easy to pay for many people and that is why most of the caregivers pick nursing homes as the only option available.
There are a lot of great nursing homes.
They have great staff, physicians are dedicated and helpful, but don't fool ourselves.
It is an institution where people loose their personal identity and give up a lot of their individualism to join the system and get cared for in a group setting, where things happen at certain times, and schedules are adhered to, and you have your room, or you're with your roommate, and you have the nursing station in the middle and the long hall.
Here all your life full of tragedies, disappointments, love, and losses is written on a several pages of paper and consists of medication lists and doctors orders.
It feels like a hospital.
It is a hospital.
In the United States, as well as other industrialized nations, nursing homes are increasingly becoming the place of care and site of death.
In both England and Australia, one in five persons now dies in a nursing home.
In the United States, currently, one in four persons die in a nursing home, and in six US states, the rate is more than one in three.
By 2040, nearly one in two persons will die in a nursing home.
Studies by the National Institute of Health confirm that the rate for severely depressed elderly in nursing homes is up to 40% - more than 14 times the national average for this age group.
This news does not really surprise me.
Even when we visit nursing home, we feel disturbed, and we try to escape to the sunlight as soon as possible from the long corridors with the smell of medications mixed with the smell of death, from the rooms where you see people with feeding tubes, catheters, diapers, where concentration of pain, sickness and despair is so high that you can hardly breathe.
Some time ago I stopped in the living room where my parents were watching some Old Russian movie.
I looked at the screen where large family was getting ready for dinner.
Kids were running around, mother was screaming at them, father was silently reading newspaper while sipping water from the bottle.
Grandma was sitting in the wheelchair holding a big fat cat.
One of the kids was trying to hide behind her chair and she started to smile and talk to him in a soft voice.
She was in the middle of the crowd, being a part of the family, feeling that she was alive, that there were so many things that she needed to see in her life while her grandkids were growing that leaving this world was not an option.
Why cannot we as a society provide a way to keep our old people in their own homes as long as possible? Why cannot we make sure that our grandparents stay as long as possible in familiar and comfortable surroundings that provide greater control over their daily lives, reinforce a sense of independence and self esteem that is important to their mental and physical health? Why should we live with constant feeling of guilt when we leave our loved ones in the nursing homes? If government can pay more than $60,000 a year for the patient in the nursing home, I am sure they can come up with some alternative ways to help family members to take care of the elderly people in their own homes as long as possible.
AARP estimates that unpaid caregivers, who contribute financially, spend an average of $2,400 a year on care.
Those who put in more than 40 hours a week spend much more: an average of $3,888 of their own money each year, AARP says.
The typical unpaid caregiver is a 46-year-old woman who works outside the home while taking care of a relative, according to AARP.
That burden forces her to cut the hours she works at her regular job by about 41%, causing her salary and benefits to fall sharply.
It does not take a long time for these overstressed and tired women to give up and leave their relatives in the nursing home.
By paying to the nursing homes and not paying for the alternative way of living, government supports the idea of moving old people to the nursing homes as soon as possible.
Who will benefit from this? Old people? I doubt so.
Nobody living in a nursing home wants to be there.
Young people? Growing up without interaction with elderly leave us without understanding of aging.
The situation in California is even worse than in other states.
California is forcing thousands of people into nursing homes who may not actually need to be there.
At a time when 35 other states are opting to cover "assisted living" care, which feels less like a medical institution and more like home, California picks up only the costlier tab for nursing homes.
Experts say that from 20 to 70 percent of nursing home residents could be well cared for in assisted living, board-and-care homes or at home with aides, at two-thirds of the cost of nursing homes.
Most elderly people whose minds and bodies are damaged by Alzheimer's and Parkinson's don't really require medical care.
They need help with feeding, bathing, grooming, toileting.
They need personal attention, but instead they found themselves in the rooms with two or three other patients , breathing air bristled with the scent of disinfectant, strapped to the wheelchairs instead of walking, losing weight and get constantly scared by the new people who surround them.
State is spending more than $2 billion per year on them in the nursing homes instead of spending much less for the homier options where residents feel safe, where they have bedrooms, kitchen tables, porches, pets and privacy, where kids visit them much more often and every single thing remind them of the life they had and all the people they met during their long journey.
I haven't seen Bertha for some time.
I don't want to ask, I know the answer.
The residents in the nursing home come and go without saying good-bye.
The only things that remind me about her are pictures.
They are still on the wall.
The young ambitious and full of energy girl on one of the pictures looks sad today.
I hope there is no connections in time and she does not understand what would happen to her in sixty years, I hope she will keep looking at the handsome young man on the picture who would be her love for the next fifty years without hesitation that the future is brilliant, that the death does not exist, and that at the end she will just stay in the waiting room for a little bit to enter a new world where pain and suffering of aging disappear forever.
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