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it sucks getting older, I am only 28 but i can only feel it
hypatia said:It is not that life is so short, its just that death is so long.
Maui said:At around what age do degeneration and suffering begin to impact severely one's daily life(assuming one doesn't have a genetic pre-disposition towards illnesses)?
alt said:
Yet not to thine eternal resting-place
Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish
Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down
With patriarchs of the infant world--with kings,
The powerful of the earth--the wise, the good,
Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,
All in one mighty sepulchre.
Forgetfulness
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
Billy Collins
castro94 said:i maybe to young to understand this , but i don't think that growing up is that bad, i believe that there is a time for everything, even your body and brain tell you so , i read an article about how a teenagers brain is not good at handling stress , because it has not been developed "enough" , i see this just as nature way to let us learn and enjoy every single step of our life ,
you can't run without learnimg how to walk , when you learn to walk you are happy beacuse it is a lot of places you can go to, and youinow can do as your parents and the people around , but once you learn how to run the joy is differnet , not better , just different , you will never forget how to walk , but now you can do it " faster" , this doesn't mean that runnig is better than walking , it is just different , and its just the way it is supposed to be , nothing more. the same goes with everything else in life. we forget to enjoy all the different experinces life throws at us , we are to eager to get to the next step , and when we are there we just want to go back
dont ask for to much , but make sure to enjoy what you get, that's what i like to live up to
Sorry to hear about your wife's aunt passing today Turbo, my thoughts are with you and your family.turbo said:My wife's favorite aunt died this morning. A very loving and understanding woman. These things happen, and I'm so glad that she didn't suffer physically or have to undergo degradation in her mental capacities. 93 years old with a relatively sharp decline after a great life... That's OK.
Thanks. We all have our allotted time, and she had a good life, with some devoted children. I haven't seen her for a few years (perfume problems) but whenever I spoke to her on the phone, she always seemed quick-witted with a decent sense of humor. I couldn't hope for more.rhody said:Sorry to hear about your wife's aunt passing today Turbo, my thoughts are with you and your family.
Rhody...
SecularSanity said:I can no longer gain muscle mass by simply drinking a glass of orange juice. I have to work out hard just to avoid the saggy butt syndrome. My teenager can fart muscles, watch one episode of South Park, and know more about physics than me.![]()
nitsuj said:that's funny,
hypatia said:It is not that life is so short, its just that death is so long.
SecularSanity said:I can no longer gain muscle mass by simply drinking a glass of orange juice. I have to work out hard just to avoid the saggy butt syndrome.
turbo said:Hard news, Andre. When an elderly person is suffering, with no chance of remission, there ought to be a legal way out.
I don't get why death with dignity isn't allowed everywhere. A person is terminally ill, in incredible pain, there is nothing doctors can do at this point. At this point any person should be able to say "end this". I have known people dying of cancer that suffered horribly and needlessy toward the end of their life and it was so wrong to force them to endure that suffering with no hope of recovering. What kind of monsters does that make us? All because it might offend someone's beliefs?lisab said:There is, in some states (Washington and Oregon, maybe more). But it must be arranged well in advance of being needed, as it has to be reviewed by third parties.
Evo said:I don't get why death with dignity isn't allowed everywhere. A person is terminally ill, in incredible pain, there is nothing doctors can do at this point. At this point any person should be able to say "end this". I have known people dying of cancer that suffered horribly and needlessy toward the end of their life and it was so wrong to force them to endure that suffering with no hope of recovering. What kind of monsters does that make us? All because it might offend someone's beliefs?
I completely agree. Then again, I'm Dutch, and according to Santorum, we kill our elderly for fun here.Evo said:I don't get why death with dignity isn't allowed everywhere. A person is terminally ill, in incredible pain, there is nothing doctors can do at this point. At this point any person should be able to say "end this". I have known people dying of cancer that suffered horribly and needlessy toward the end of their life and it was so wrong to force them to endure that suffering with no hope of recovering. What kind of monsters does that make us? All because it might offend someone's beliefs?
Andre said:Anyway, I've been preoccupied with watching my inlaw dad die in slow motion this month. It took about 10 days, after he was discharged from hospital, because the treatment of the illness was even worse to his organs. There were no more options left.
The last two days were really awful. Nobody should have to suffer like that. Really shocking. You'd like to shout to the doc, just to increase the dose of morphine more and more.
But that's illegal, which seems to be more important than useless suffering.
lisab said:There is, in some states (Washington and Oregon, maybe more). But it must be arranged well in advance of being needed, as it has to be reviewed by third parties.
Borek said:It is not.
SecularSanity said:We met with the medical board, who after speaking with the nurse, told us that she did not want to contribute to his death, due to her religious beliefs. It was a religious hospital.
If this is of any comfort to you, Dr Teno, and sympathetic members of congress with whom she has testified have been working for years to address the issues that you stated in your post. Hospice care in the patients last days is certainly a start. Many people are unaware that this service is available to them, and BTW, there are two categories of hospice care, paid hospice and volunteer hospice. You should research both, ask probing questions of each before making your decision to go with one or the other.In a study we conducted of survivors of individuals who had been in a
nursing home in their last weeks of life, we found about one in three people
reported the need for better pain control, that they did not have enough emotional
support, and stated that their loved one was not treated with dignity. Only 42%
rated the care of their loved one as excellent compared to 70% for those persons
dying at home with hospice services. 3 Behind these rates lie compelling stories of
the urgency and need to improve.
I can only state what we experienced with my wife's Mom passing last year, we had FOR PROFIT hospice care BTW. We had all the necessary paperwork for end of life directives filled out, signed, etc... My wife, her sister were the ones to carry out the advanced medical directives, and Dr Teno was by our side for the last two days of my wife's mother's suffering. Once the directive has been ordered and the doses of medication's were delivered to the Alzeheimer's unit where her Mom stayed, it was the designated responsibilty of the person taking responsibility of the meds to deliver them to ease her Mom's pain, which for the most part were carried out to the letter. You need to have a place to secure the meds, and again Dr Teno came through for us, she bought us a lock box to keep them in and snacks for everyone while we maintained vigil over her Mom. Thankfully, Dr Teno was there to guide us through the process.lisab said:Yikes, what a nightmare that must have been, SS!
That pisses me off.
Thanks!lisab said:Yikes, what a nightmare that must have been, SS!
That pisses me off.
rhody said:After SecularSanity's post I felt compelled to respond. My wife works for Dr Joan Teno, at Brown University, a recognized expert on end of life issues worldwide. Please refer to this report. If you google Joan Teno you will find lots of other testimony as well. This is a sample.
If this is of any comfort to you, Dr Teno, and sympathetic members of congress with whom she has testified have been working for years to address the issues that you stated in your post. Hospice care in the patients last days is certainly a start. Many people are unaware that this service is available to them, and BTW, there are two categories of hospice care, paid hospice and volunteer hospice. You should research both, ask probing questions of each before making your decision to go with one or the other.
Rhody...
turbo said:My wife's aunt's obituary is in today's paper. I knew that she was a nurse, but didn't know that she was the assistant chief of the nursing staff in an American military hospital 67th General Hospital in England during WWII, or that she was a captain when she was discharged from the Army.
Thanks. Helen was a wonderful woman, and sharp as a tack all of her life. Typical "dry" sense of humor that is the norm in Maine. She never told me about her war-time service, and it also came as a surprise to my wife. The obit featured a photo of her in her Army uniform. She was a really good-looking woman.physics girl phd said:It's things like this that make you realize that so many wonderful stories go untold. My dad (who had passed away prior) had told us that Grandpa had "taught math and other subjects" when he was stationed at WPAFB during WWII. But grandpa's obit indicated he was in an intelligence unit... I personally suspect cryptography/cryptanalysis based on some of his other connections (such as NCR), but of course, who knows. Towards the end, Grandpa would have been senile enough to probably tell us had we known what to ask. He could go on and on about early baseball (God bless some of my former boyfriends for listening to all that...).
Sorry about your loss...
Such as?turbo said:There should be laws... Effective, enforced laws.
There's nothing compared to the care that family members can provide. Fortunately, both my grandparents were well cared until their death. They didn't have to go to a "nursing home". But still there's nothing compared to taking your own care.turbo said:It seems that some "nursing homes" in Maine are warehouses for the elderly, and that really ticks me off. My mother-in-law was on a waiting-list for a highly-regarded nursing home a few miles from here, close enough so that all of her children could have visited regularly, and the "crazy sisters" bullied the sane sisters into allowing them to keep her at home. The chief crazy sister moved her mother into her house, and when she found out that she couldn't provide 24-hour care for a 95-year-old with senile dementia, she parked her in a nursing home 1/2 hour away.
My wife and her sole sane sister do their best to visit her to find out how she is being treated, and it doesn't look good. If they show up in late afternoon and their mother is sedated and confined to a wheelchair, with her bed still unmade, things look sad. I don't want to go that way.
There should be laws... Effective, enforced laws.
rootX said:There's nothing compared to the care that family members can provide.
rootX said:There's nothing compared to the care that family members can provide.
Yes that's true in this 8-hours world. But I never heard of these nursing homes before I moved to cities. It was more like a taboo to throw your parents into nursing house.Borek said:Not really. For someone working normal 8-hours job that's unrealistic, especially when your elders require 24 hours watch.
One of my relatives was on living on those oxygen things. They have bedrooms upstairs so it was quite a bit of work to bring her down everytime she had to visit doctor. She spent pretty much all of her last days in her bedroom.Andre said:Interestingly, my current appartment was designed for care taking of seniors. Everything required for living is on the groundfloor for the seniors, and then upstairs there is another living facility for caretakers. The upstairs kitchen sink has been removed a long time ago. Not practical.
But I can handle some overnights for guests.![]()