(Sidebar: I love my grandfather. In fact I love my whole family, as evidenced hopefully by my commitment to helping my grandfather heal. But this blog is meant to be therapeutic for me and full of uncensored honesty. So please take everything here with the understanding that - bitch and complain though I might - I would take a bullet for my family.)
So where were we? Right... kill yourself. My father's favorite line is "Just put me in the woods with the wolves." His wishes are that I just drop him in the middle of the wilderness when he gets to be too feeble to take care of himself. Eventually the wild animals (sometimes it's wolves, sometimes bears) will come for him and he will succumb, a beautiful act of the natural order, and perish in the jaws of a large predator. That's not a joke - that's what he wants. My father is very dramatic.
You may be asking yourself why on earth I would have to sit at my grandfather's hospital bed for 60 hours a week. To answer that, here's a math problem:
Mike has $1000. His health insurance costs $500 a week. There are 168 hours in a week. Mike needs 24/7 personal care, which costs $20 per hour. How many hours of personal care can Mike afford?
The answer is 25. So out of 168 hours in a week, my family can afford to hire someone to watch over him for 25 hours. Which leaves us to split up the remaining 143 hours. And before you ask - the answer is "yes". Yes, he needs someone with him 24/7. One of the symptoms of his dementia is confusion, and he has no idea that he's on bedrest. At 10AM you can remind him that he has a hip fracture and is on bedrest. At 10:05, he will try to get out of bed to go to the bathroom. At 10:30 he'll tell you that he has to get dressed for work. At 10:45 he'll try to get up to go pay for his newspaper. By 11AM he'll be fast asleep, only to play out the same scenario when he wakes up at noon.
Hospital and rehab facilities are great, but they can't provide the level of care that my grandfather needs. The bed alarms that let the nurses know he's up only go off AFTER a person's off the bed (at which point he'd already have put weight on his leg and probably collapsed to the floor). And it is illegal to strap a patient to their bed, even if it would absolutely do more good than harm.
So that leaves us with one option - 24-hour a day care, however we can swing it. As a former stage manager, I am very adept at making schedules. So I have taken on the responsibility of "assigning" shifts to my family members. Dad gets 2am-7:30. I get 7:30am-6pm. Mom takes over from 6pm-10pm. Then we have an elder care company come in from 10-2. Since I run my own business, I have the most "flexibility" with my schedule. But there are days when I have to, y'know, work or take meetings with clients. So then we have to pay someone else to watch granddad. So depending on how busy of a week I have, that chews up most of my 25 hour buffer meaning that I get to pull the overnight shift sometimes to make up for it. Let's just say that it's been a long week. And if the doctor's right, we've got another 7 weeks - or 1176 hours - to go.
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