#eldercare

[northgazaupdates]

UPDATE: NEW LINK! Yahya and his family were displaced by the IOF, and are currently residing in Deir al-Balah, south-central Gaza.

Life as displaced Gazans was already extremely difficult for them. Food is very scarce, and their living conditions leave them exposed to the elements. Here is the frequent condition of their tent now that the winter rains have come:

Then, Yahya’s father was injured. Some cartilage was damaged in his neck, and doctors say he requires IMMEDIATE surgery to avoid permanent paralysis.

Yahya and his family previously had another campaign, but it was suddenly shut down by GFM with no explanation. They have created a new one, but it has EXTREMELY LOW FUNDS.

The surgery is a stifling €15,000 euros (about $15,729 USD). Yahya and his family have no hope of paying for it without your help.

I am currently watching an elderly loved one lose their mobility, and it is an extremely heartbreaking and isolating situation. I cannot imagine what Yahya and his family are going through, having no social or financial support and only minimal medical care.

Please give what you can to this family. You are their only hope to save their beloved father’s mobility!

[beardedmrbean]

Nursing home staff finding ways to keep their charges engaged and entertained.

Slingshot on the walker is my fav I think.

[fracktastic]

So, my mother keeps complaining about how my grandmother won't eat the cauliflower she made or turned down an extra healthy protein-fiber-shake with extra antioxidants.

I make extra cheese-stuffed grilled cheesey-pita and she gobbles it up. Plate of cookies? Demolished.

Omg. She's 93 and she keeps dropping weight. Let her eat whatever TF she wants.

/endrant

Update: we have moved on to the ice cream course. I think we're up to about 600 kCal 🎉🎉🎉

[ahedderick]

Who is this bearded hillbilly?

I had to go into a wing of the hospital recently to pick up some paperwork. I think that the whole, massive building is always going to remind me of my father's final days. I don't have any positive memories, really, to offset that difficult time; my children were born in the 'old' hospital, which has since been torn down.

I kinda saved my sanity in those ten awful days by buying a large spiral notebook. While I was in there I could make lists of things I needed to do (I knew I wouldn't remember when I got home) and also make notes on what was happening medically. It wasn't actually a journal, but looking back at those pages also brings memories back strongly.

At the one-week mark, when the doctors were still insisting that he would recover, a pleasant Dr with a lengthy Indian name was in the room talking to us. She asked him who I was (checking his mental function). He slurred "C'est ma fille." She gave me a startled look, probably thinking that was gibberish, and I gently shook his shoulder and reminded him, "No French, stick with English right now."

"Is he . . French?" she asked me, still looking startled. I told her he was not. It is, as they say . . complicated.

The bearded, nearly toothless elderly Appalachian man in the bed once spoke Spanish and French conversationally, and had more than a bit of German, as well. He studied that simply for the love of learning it. He also had some pretty strong feelings about math and chemistry. He was a farmer. He was a welder. He was an alcoholic. He was an extrovert who hated people. Complicated!!

So now I walk into that building, and I start remembering everything. It's a difficulty. And it's complicated.

[rj-anderson]

It's quite a thing to adjust to being back on eldercare duty 9-12 hours a day, every day [1], which is pretty close to how my life was five years ago right before my dad's needs became so overwhelming that we had to transfer him to a nursing home. [2]

Except my dad's weaknesses were mostly physical — mentally he was quite sharp for a nearly 95-year-old — and back then my mom was well enough to keep him company, do the cleaning and laundry, and make meals for him so I could focus on managing his home care (and all the phone calls and paperwork that involved), helping him in and out of bed for naps, and wheeling him to and from the washroom as needed. Even if it was a lot of work, I wasn't doing ALL the work, and I could go for a walk in the woods or run a few errands without worrying (much) that Bad Things would happen in my absence. My mom, though, is physically in decent shape for 92, apart from her Meniere's Disease (aka chronic vertigo). But over the past year she's been increasingly losing her executive function and ability to retain recent memories. She's starting to leave her essential items like hearing aids and glasses in odd places around the house, and getting distressed when she can't find them.

Most tasks that used to be routine for Mom are beyond her now, and even writing down the steps for her doesn't help. She either forgets to look at the instructions, or she's too confused to follow them. Even answering the phone is a challenge these days, because if she can't hear the caller right away (which she usually can't, despite the volume enhancement) she starts pressing buttons at random and hangs up on them more often than not.

So for the past three months I've been running downstairs every hour or two all day to give my mom her medications, make her lunch and dinner, do her laundry, take her for her daily walk, answer her phone, turn on the TV for her, shepherd her through her nightly bedtime routine, and reassure her when she's worried about something she can't remember. It takes up a big chunk of every day in addition to my own family and church responsibilities (neither of which I want to give up or think I should). And that's assuming Mom doesn't have one of her out-of-the-blue excruciating nerve pain attacks, a fairly new development which involves a whole other level of care and leave us both exhausted for a day or more afterward. [3]

But the hardest part is that I can't leave the house now, even for a short time, without hiring a professional caregiver or recruiting a family member to take my place. My mom no longer remembers how to phone me in a crisis, and is unable to take any of her needed vertigo or pain medications on her own. If someone isn't right there to help, Bad Things will most definitely happen at some point, and more likely sooner than later.

Worse, I have no sisters, only brothers, all of whom live hours away. And as my Mom's need for care becomes increasingly specialized and personal, they're less and less equipped -- or suitable, from a woman's point of view -- to help her for more than a few hours at a time. And if Mom has one of her out-of-the-blue pain attacks, they aren't trained to give her the injection she needs. [4] So they'd have to give her oral meds and watch her suffer for 30-45 minutes before the pills kick in — and having gone through that myself several times now, I wouldn't wish the experience on my worst enemy. Or put my Mom through that much pain again, if I can help it.

But she's not in pain, or sick with vertigo, all the time. In fact, she can go for days or weeks without an attack. She's able to move about freely with her walker, chat with visiting helpers and family, stroke our two cats and enjoy looking out the back window at our yard. She looks forward to the meals I make for her and exclaims over how tasty and nourishing they are. She's lived in my basement for 20 years now, so everything is familiar and comforting. And right now, she's as safe here as she could be anywhere. The idea of transferring her to a care home even if there was a bed available (which there isn't — the waiting list in this area is 3-5 years for 24-hour nursing care and 10 years for assisted living) just doesn't seem to make sense, or be anything but cruel to her. And while there are some places that offer overnight respite care for up to a week, they only do that for clients enrolled in their adult day programs — which my mom can't attend because of her complex and unpredictable symptoms.

So I don't know when I'll ever get another vacation. I certainly can't take any overnight trips, or even day trips, right now. Unless I hire a registered nurse to stay with Mom the whole time I'm gone, and pay her hundreds of dollars to do it.

I don't really know why I'm writing this, except to get it off my chest. I love my Mom and I want to do my best for her. I'm thankful that despite her physical and mental health issues she is a loving, grateful and overall very obliging person to care for. She thanks and praises me for everything I do to help her, and apologizes for taking up so much of my time. I know she never wanted to put me in this position any more than I want to be in it.

But it's hard. It's really, really hard. And I wish I knew how long this is going to go on.

-- [1] Not counting the occasional calls in the middle of the night, which I hope will be fewer now that I've moved the call bell to keep my mom from knocking it by accident.

[2] Dad passed in early 2020, just before the pandemic. I'm still thanking God daily for that timing because I can't even imagine what it would have been like trying to visit him in lockdown.

[3] We've been to the hospital and our family doctor multiple times about this. Nobody can figure out why it's happening or how to stop it. We're supposed to get a CT scan at some point, which I hope will give us some more answers, but that could be weeks or months away.

[4] I myself was only trained a few days ago, and without any medical background or experience, I'm far from confident about it. Not even sure how well it's going to work, but something has to.

[readersmagnet]

Eleanor Gaccetta's "One Caregiver's Journey" reflects her transition from a successful policy analyst and contractor to a full-time caregiver for her 92-year-old mother. After nearly four decades of a distinguished career, Eleanor dedicated herself to caregiving, sharing her experiences in this heartfelt memoir. Her story offers invaluable insights into the challenges and rewards of caregiving. 

Discover Ellie Gaccetta's heartfelt story in "One Caregiver's Journey." Learn about her transition from a successful career to full-time caregiver. Visit https://onecaregiversjourney.com/ and order your copy today for an inspiring read!

[billionbrilliantstars]

VP Kamala Harris knows our seniors deserve dignity and care.

[noon-for-moon]

Being a daughter is forgiving your father.. over and over again

Being a daughter is healing your mother's trauma.. while also healing yours

Being a daughter is carrying the heavy weight dumped onto you by your elders...

[flickeredsilence]

(idk who the artist is- my sincerest apologies)

around my second year of caring for my dad, in 2022, I became obsessed with bird watching. I followed in my dad's footsteps, putting mixed bird seed and suet into a variety of feeders around our small backyard. It took them a few days, but the birds found my yard. In no time, I was going through 20 pound bags of seed like it was nothing. I sat glued to my windows, watching the birds flit around the feeders. I watched over the course of two years, mother's feeding their young, mates quarrelling, and flocks growing. I would excitedly grab my dad from his chair and have him look at them flying and feasting. I installed a window feeder so my dad could see them up close which was better because he also had poor vision. We would sit in my den and watch them and listen as the shells of sunflower seeds fell loudly on the window sill.

Those birds provided an unimaginable amount of solace. They were life.

Attached are a few pics I took from our window feeder.

[yogadaily]

(via Pin on General Info  || Curated with love by yogadaily) 

[fracktastic]

m grandmother rn frfr

[ahedderick]

Dementia research

I'm boggled - but in a good way. This is a brilliant read, and a little too long for me to summarize . . but imagine all the things small, interactive robots could do to improve the lives of dementia patients. There isn't one solution, here; but as many different solutions as there are dementia patients and roboticists.

[acupofteaonthecommode]

And Then There Were Seven

We all seek healthier, more fulfilling, and productive lives, and books are an important tool for gaining knowledge about how to achieve these goals for ourselves and our loved ones. Each year, “Books for Better Living” are chosen for their unique ability to enrich readers’ lives and promote global sustainability. The Living Now Awards medalists are an exceptionally impressive list of inspiring…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

KPMG audits the nursing homes it advises on how to beat audits

Tomorrow (May 10), I’m in VANCOUVER for a keynote at the Open Source Summit and a book event for Red Team Blues at Heritage Hall and on Thurs (May 11), I’m in CALGARY for Wordfest.

Auditors are capitalism’s lubricants, who keep the gears of finance capital smoothly a-whirl, allowing investors to move their money in and out of companies without having to go pore over their books and walk through their facilities. Without auditors, the gears of capitalism would grind themselves to dust:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/18/ink-stained-wretches/#countless

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/09/dingo-babysitter/#maybe-the-dingos-ate-your-nan

Unfortunately for capitalism, auditing is irredeemably broken. The Big Four auditors (PWC, EY, Deloitte and KPMG) have merged to monopoly, becoming “too big to fail” and “too big to jail.” These four gigantic firms have spun up fantastically lucrative “consulting” divisions that advise companies on how to cheat on their audits and attain incredible (paper) gains. The work of these “consultants” is worth far more than the accounting and auditing jobs the companies do, and the weaker the audits are, the more profitable the consulting is:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/04/aaronsw/#crooked-ref

This crisis has been a long time brewing. Back in 2001, the accounting/consulting giant Arthur Andersen was at the center of Enron’s fraud, which lit $11B in shareholder capital on fire. Enron had been making everyday people angry for years, engineering rolling blackouts and incredible energy-price gouging, but no one cares about working peoples’ complaints. By contrast, stealing $11B from rich people was something the authorities couldn’t ignore. They gave Andersen the death penalty, trying to teach the surviving accounting firms a lesson about what happens when you fuck with plutes.

But those other firms learned the wrong lesson: the collapse of Andersen was so disruptive that it soon became clear that the authorities would never take another giant consulting firm down, no matter how egregious its conduct was. They doubled down on crime, and then doubled down again.

It’s hard to pick a winner in the Big Four Accounting Firm Corruption Olympics, but KPMG is a strong contender, with a long history of just being monumentally inept and wrong. Back when Enron was unspooling, KPMG devoted itself to threatening people who linked to its website “without a license to do so”:

https://web.archive.org/web/20020207141547/http://chris.raettig.org/email/jnl00040.html

A couple years later, they declared war on wifi, trying to convince normies that wireless networks were an existential risk to human civilization:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2885339.stm

But there’s not much money in wifi scare stories or licenses to link. KPMG are good dialectical materialists, devoted to money over ideology, and boy did they figure out some wild ways to make money. For one thing, they figured out that they could get more accountants certified by cheating…on ethics exams:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-kpmg-cheating-scandal-was-much-more-widespread-than-originally-thought-2019-06-18

KPMG’s top managers bribed regulators to give them the answer-sheets for ethics exams. What did they bribe those public employees with? Jobs at KPMG:

https://www.pogo.org/investigation/2020/01/how-accountants-took-washingtons-revolving-door-to-a-criminal-extreme

There’s hardly a month that goes by without another KPMG scandal somewhere in the world, with enormous monetary and social fallout. During the lockdowns, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government outsourced the creation and maintenance of ArriveCAN (a contact tracing app for people who entered Canada) to a grifter called GC Strategies, who billed millions for their services. GC Strategies didn’t do any work — instead, they paid KPMG $1,000-$1,500 day to hire freelancers to build the app. The app itself was a catastrophic failure, and that failure didn’t just embarrass the government — it also failed to protect Canadians during a once-in-a-century global pandemic. KPMG raked off a 30% commission:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/31/mckinsey-and-canada/#comment-dit-beltway-bandits-en-canadien

In the USA, KPMG helped Microsoft work up a radioactively illegal tax-evasion scheme. Microsoft poured the millions it saved by cheating on its taxes into dark-money operations that lobbied to defund the IRS so that KPMG and Microsoft could cook up even more illegal tax-evasion schemes:

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-irs-decided-to-get-tough-against-microsoft-microsoft-got-tougher

But KPMG doesn’t content itself with screwing over everyday people and rotting our democratic institutions — it also engages in the dangerous business of helping billionaires steal from millionaires. KPMG was the auditor that signed off on the scam “oil company” Miller Energy Partners, a fraud that operated for years thanks to KPMG’s rubber-stamp on its crooked books:

https://www.desmog.com/2021/06/03/miller-energy-kpmg-auditors-oil-fraud/

The company was run by serial fraudsters with long rapsheets for stealing millions. They staffed their C-suite with executives from disgraced companies that had been busted for running Ponzi schemes, issuing press releases praising those execs’ “proven track records in raising capital.” KPMG ignored every red flag, ignored the hundreds of millions in fraud on the books — and when the whole thing came crashing down, the responsible KPMG partner kept his job for years, until retiring with a full and fat pension.

More recently, KPMG made millions by confidently certifying the stability of a large regional bank, assuring investors and depositors that it was managing its risk and could be trusted. The name of the client that KPMG was so bullish on will be familiar to you: Silicon Valley Bank:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kpmg-faces-scrutiny-for-audits-of-svb-and-signature-bank-42dc49dd

KPMG epitomizes the idea of Too Big To Fail and Too Big to Jail. Despite being at the center of virtually every major finance scandal, it continues to thrive and grow. Remember the Carillion bust, in which billions went up in smoke and swathes of privatized government services vanished overnight? Not only did KPMG sign off on fraudulent Carillion books, but it escaped fines for doing so — and got paid to help administer Carillion’s bankruptcy:

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/uk-watchdog-fines-kpmg-24-mln-over-carillion-regenersis-audits-2022-07-25/

Despite this, KPMG continues to find willing buyers for its services. After all, when the sector is dominated by four giant, lavishly corrupt firms, there’s not much choice in the matter:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/29/great-andersens-ghost/#mene-mene-bezzle

This is bad news for the investor class, of course, but it’s even worse news for the people who rely on the services that KPMG certifies, even as it helps grifters destroy them. Every kind of business relies on audits, from transit to aviation to day-care to eldercare.

Here’s a scary one for you: in Australia, the job of auditing residential eldercare homes’ compliance with safety and anti-abuse rules has been outsourced to KPMG. While KPMG earns a mid-sized fortune from these audits, it earns far more advising the owners of residential aged care homes on how to beat those audits:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/may/04/firm-performing-australian-aged-care-audit-also-charging-providers-for-expertise

KPMG says that the division that ensures the safety and dignity of elderly people is firewalled off from the division that advises companies on how to spend as little as possible on that safety and dignity — but KPMG also went to great lengths to keep the fact that it was selling services to both sides a secret.

Once the secret got out, an anonymous KPMG spokesmonster said, “When considering a request to perform an audit, we undertake a detailed process to ensure the engagement is free of conflicts.”

It’s hypothetically possible that this is true, but anyone who believes anything KPMG says is a sucker. The company’s rap-sheet goes back decades. This is, after all, a company that cheated on its ethics exams.

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[Image ID: Two business-suited male figures seen side on; each has a bomb for a head, and each is holding a lit lighter that has ignited the other's fuse. Each bomb is wearing a green accountant's eyeshade. In the background is a fiery mushroom cloud. They wear KPMG logos on their lapels.]

Image:

Vectorportal.com (modified) https://vectorportal.com/vector/business-deal-illustration/23215

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Inspired by an illustration by Matt Kenyon for the Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/content/07184d86-81cf-11e2-b050-00144feabdc0