Care in the Community

My Aunty is in Hospital. She's 84 and after many years of gradually fading, riddled with Dementia, her memory falling apart, she spends her day fretting, worrying and repeating the following mantra to herself.

"A sophisticated rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself"

After repeating this quote from Disrali to me at least 15 times yesterday she then says hopefully, "I must be ok if I can say that properly?"

I look at her and agree, "you're ok for now"

She says tearfully "I want to go home, please tell them to let me go home"

I say (rather lamely) they'll decide what's for the best.

I dread the upcoming Case Conference to which she, of course, will be invited, where I will have to say, "I think she needs full time care and the idea she can cope at home (with support from Social Services) is plainly wrong-headed and too much of a risk"

I fear Dave's Big Society will condemn her to such a fate, however. Full-time care being reserved for only the completely crazy and utterly demented.

Pray God my endings will be somehow better

JVIP