L27:Is the Prospect of Growing Old a Bleak One?

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The Prospect of Growing OId Is Horrifying

My father has an organic brain disease. It's Parkinson's disease, and in his case it has led to the additional trauma of Parkinsonian dementia. He is in and out of reality. At times, he is as clever as can be--until he sees snakes or space stations or trucks in his room.
My mother and I together could no longer handle him at home. He required physical assistance for every move and his behavior became too unpredictable. At home, he never slept and neither did we. He also suffers from a narrowing of his spinal column, which pinches the nerves in his back and leaves him unable to find a painless position in bed.

We brought him to the hospital, where he stayed for seven weeks, until its utilization review board decided he no longer needed hospital care. They kicked him out.
We put him in a nursing home, recommended as top of the line, with one nursing aide for every 15 patients(if everyone shows up for work). My father cannot feed himself nor get to and from the bathroom. One nurse's aide with 15 patients cannot attend to his needs.

So my mother spends seven to eight hours each day at the nursing home. My father cries, yells and does all he knows to keep her there. He thinks he is home and can't understand why she leaves him each evening. He thinks she has other men.
He tells her she is boring a hole in his heart. She cries. The nursing home costs $ 45, 000 per year. My father is lucky: Unlike most Americans, he has a decent union pension. But his pension, added to his Social Security paymet, puts him over the income eligibility levei for Medicaid in Florida. Not only is he disqualified from receiving Medicaid itself, his insurance only pays for claims certified by Medicaid.

None of the diseases afflicting my father are fatal. He is 69 year's old, and both his parents lived to be 90. My family could be spending $ 45, 000 a year for the next 20 years. It's money we don't have.
My mother is heartsick. They worked and saved and bought insurance all their lives so that they could grow old in peace Now she doesn't know how she will live, let alone how to take care of him.
A lawyer suggested to my mother that she divorce my father. Yet she is the one who feeds him, cleans him and loves him. Now, after 48 years of marriage, she is being counseled to divorce him so she can keep some funds back from the nursing home. We think about canceling his pension, but then neither of them would have any income.

II . Read
Read the following passages. Underline the important viewpoints while reading.

l. About Old Age

Day:   - Professor McKay, can you tell me what you think your report on old people
will achieve?
Mckay:   We hope that it will help to change people's feelings about old age. The.
problem is that far too many of us believe that most old-.people are poor,
sick, lonely and unhappy. As a result, we tend to find old people, as a
group,unattractive. And this is very dangerous for our society.
Day:   But surely we cannot escape the fact that many old people are lonely and
many are sick.
Mckay:   No, we can't. But we must, also remember that the proportion of such people
is no greater among the 60 to 70 age group than among
the 50 to 60 age group.
Day:   In other vords, there is no more mental illness, for example, among the
60's to 70's than among the 50's to 60's?

Mckay:   Right. And why should there be? Why should we expect people
to suddenly change when they reach their 60th or 65th birthday any more than
they did when they reached their 2lst? Now that the computer age has
arrived in industry, the normal age for retirement
may be lowered to 60 or even 55. Shall we then say that old age b