Chapter Two – If You Can’t Help, Don’t Hurt
Why would anyone knowingly hurt an elderly person? Why do we have elder abuse? What kind of a monster would do that? To be frank, in the right circumstances, I think I could have hurt my grandfather, my mother, or even my children. I’m not a bad person. I’m not an angry or a violent person. It takes a lot to make me lose my temper. But, at the same time, I realize how frustrating caregiving can be. It can make nice people do very mean things. This doesn’t mean I’m condoning hurting the people for whom we’re caring. It just means that we need to be very careful about how much we take on, that we make sure we’re up to the very difficult task of caregiver, and that we know when we have to bring in additional help.
I recently had a gentleman call me on the phone. He was retired, unmarried, and had no children. He had a brother who was also retired, unmarried, and had no children. They saw no reason why they couldn’t save the family some money and take care of their mother. They had the time and they had the inclination. The trouble was, they did not have the temperament.
When the son called me, the home health care people were threatening to turn both brothers into Adult Protective Services for the way they cared for their mother. When the one son brought in his mother, it was obvious why. He had absolutely no patience with her. No matter what she said, he yelled at her. And, after our nurse came in to talk to him and to her, it was obvious that she had a broken rib. He admitted that he had shoved her a little too hard and that he had probably been the one to break her rib.
This man had no criminal record. He had intended to take good care of his mother. Her dementia was very far advanced, and it was very frustrating for him to take care of her. Finally, after he lost his temper with her and shoved her, he realized that he could no longer take care of her. If only he had been able to realize this before he had broken her rib. I honestly don’t think this man had intended to do his mother harm. But he had. He had hurt her, and he would probably have to be punished for it. We called Adult Protective Services. We had no choice. If our nurse knew the man had broken his mother’s rib and hadn’t turned him in, she could have lost her license.
How do we know when we’re about to hurt an elderly person? I remember when my mother put my grandfather into my care for four days while she and my dad went on a well-deserved vacation to Lake Powell. I thought I could handle it. I was a young wife and mother with a one-year-old child and a small house. Surely one old man couldn’t be that hard to care for.
Grandpa spent the night. At fi rst everything was all right. He repeated himself a lot. He was very judgmental of the way I did things: I should be doing this differently and I should be doing that differently. Didn’t we have cable television? My mom had cable television and he really wanted to watch his favorite soccer team, the West Brumich Albions. Why did my husband cut the grass like that? That wasn’t how he did it. He knew a much better way to cut the grass. He’d show him how next time. The baby was far too spoiled. I needed to tell the baby where the bear slept more often. She needed to be better behaved. In his day, children were to be seen and not heard.
ENOUGH! I’d had ENOUGH! And then he locked himself in the bathroom and couldn’t figure out how to get out. He was hard of hearing and I was yelling instructions to him. He just couldn’t figure it out, and I couldn’t figure out how to get him out of the bathroom. The house was built in 1916, and it was impossible to open the door from the outside. I was ready to lose whatever composure I had.
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