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Take care

Annie Gallant comments on the family's responsibility to their elderly relatives in care

As our population ages, the extended care crisis looms over the baby boomers.

We’ve watched our parents go into care facilities with varying degrees of trepidation and often much reluctance on the parents part.

But the promise of a safer, more carefree life hasn’t materialized in many cases. They’re warehoused in substandard facilities, neglected or worse, abused.

How many times on the news have we heard an adult child tell the heart-wrenching stories of mis-treatment and too often the premature death of their loved one.

Now they say that far too many seniors in facilities are being drugged for easier management, controlling their waking hours, rendering them virtually comatose.

My mother was in a facility here in Quesnel. She died peacefully in the bed she’d called home for several years.

As far as I know (and I was in close contact with her doctor), she was never administered anti-psychotic drugs.

But I can’t say there weren’t staff members I preferred never went near my mother, and was she sometimes not tended to as quickly as I believe she should have been, of course (didn’t hesitate to speak to the head nurse or higher.)

But there are many, many compassionate, caring, responsive staff who I will be eternally grateful for their care of my mother.

I believe it was myself and my family’s responsibility to visit our mother often, even if it sometimes inconvenienced us. We knew, on a daily basis, even after my mother no longer responded to us, what was going on with her. The staff knew we would be around. Nothing was slipping past us.

It was the least we could do for the woman who raised us and continued to nurture us as long as she could.

As my mother would say, “there but for the grace of God, go I.”

–Annie Gallant, Cariboo Observer