MEGAdesu

So, this is a good enough place to vent as any, I think.  This last year I’ve had to watch as my step-Dad has suffered from a rare form of dementia.  It’s basically shrinking his frontal lobes.  He’s only in his mid 50’s.  The last six months or so have been the roughest for my mom since he’s gotten progressively more frustrated and violent.  By  now there’s really nothing left of the man we once knew.  Recently, mom had to put him into a assisted living home after he injured her, toppled over furniture, and started throwing anything he could get his hands on.  The home claimed to have dealt with his condition many times before, but in the end they couldn’t and called the police to take him to a psychiatric hospital.  The hospital was a nightmare.  They decided that they didn’t want to deal with him and just pumped him full of drugs to keep him docile.  Luckily, my mother found a new nurse to take him in.  Someone that had family who they lost to Alzheimer’s.  He was only with the new nurse a few days before he suffered an overdose from all the medicine put in his system over the last few weeks he was at the hospital.  They had to rush him to another hospital where he was suffering from a temperature of 105, elevated blood pressure, and pneumonia.  They had to ultimately cut him off all the drugs cold turkey because it would do him more damage in the long run to keep him on even the slightest bit.  He’s slowly recovering now.  They can fix his heart and his lungs, but not his brain.  We found out that he’ll be going in to Hospice care within the next few days, and there are still many things to sort through and decide.  Rather hard decisions for my mother, but she knew they were coming…just not quite this soon.  I’m just a bit livid about what the ER and psychiatric hospital put him through…  If not for their mistreatment he might have made it another two years, but now his system is thoroughly screwed up.  They wouldn’t even allow my mother access to him at first in the psych hospital even though she had legal rights, and paperwork to prove she could.  They didn’t even tell her what they were giving him.  They just kept him constantly sedated because they wanted him quiet enough that he could be foisted off on someone else, and they wouldn’t have to deal with the insurance company any more…  So the next time anyone tells me there’s not a problem with our medical system they can go eat a dick.