Quote:
Originally Posted by Parker
I agree with you Villages PL. Why harass an old man who knows what he's doing? Inserting a feeding tube was cruel. Leave him to his own choices if he is of sound mind. Adult children don't always know best. Life at any price isn't always the right thing.
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I agree. We would not want our lives extended with feeding tubes.
When we registered my mom for the end of life skilled nursing home, she already had her wishes down on paper from ten years earlier.....
"no feeding tubes".
What I was trying to point out was that many elders are suffering from anorexia which goes unnoticed........they often are widowed or widowered (is that a word?) with no one to actually see what they are eating or not eating.
After my stepfather died, we had my mom over every night for supper and would drive her back to her home with a covered dish for her lunch the next day. She kept losing weight. Obviously, she was forgetting to eat.
The dishes would disappear. It was very strange. I finally figured out she was giving them away.
We soon realized how confused she was. She had lost a tremendous amount of weight.......long story which I have written about on other posts. Once she came to live with us, she was back on the road to good nutrition.
When we cleaned out her refrigerator, she had dozens of OLD OLD OLD expired containers and expired milk......LONG STORY....but this is a typical saga of adult children who discover their parent's confusion and anorexia when the spouse of the elder dies. It's like one was the "brain" for the other........and the surviving one cannot cope. Or could not cope to begin with. Alzheimers is truly the long goodbye......as many adult children find out.
Loss of appetite and loss of weight is a very big concern re the elderly.