The Unhelpful Answer: Take Care of Your Brain

Atria Park of San Mateo is a senior-living facility less than two miles from our house. Although a few residents do not require daily medical attention, the majority do, with many suffering from dementia. Alzheimer's patients whom we knew personally spent their final years at Atria Park.

Today's headline is a blow to its business:

Woman suffering from dementia dies at Bay Area nursing home after being served dishwashing liquid

San Mateo police said a 93-year-old woman residing at an assisted living facility in the city died, and two others were hospitalized, after “ingesting toxic chemicals.”

Employees at Atria Park of San Mateo mistakenly served the three residents dishwashing liquid on Saturday morning, facility officials said in a statement...

The woman who died was Gertrude Elizabeth Murison Maxwell, who had eight children and 20 grandchildren, KRON-TV reported. The woman’s daughter said Maxwell, who suffers from dementia and cannot feed herself, had “severe blistering of her mouth and throat and esophagus.”

I often walk by the facility.

I have learned not to form snap judgments, but in this case I don't see how dishwashing liquid could reasonably be mistaken for a juice beverage. If the aides were incredibly harried, I suppose it's possible--for example, in my mother's facility in Hawaii multiple patients must be given medication at 3 p.m. according to doctors' orders--but then the under-staffing had to be extreme.

As the Journal noted last month:

70% of people over 65 will need long-term services and support, but many won’t get it because there aren’t enough caregivers. This shortage, the AARP says, is going to get worse in the next decade. There will be a national shortage of 151,000 caregivers by 2030.

Atria Park won't be on my list of final destinations, but the real answer seems to be to take care of my brain. If poor Ms. Maxwell understood what was happening to her and could communicate her distress, this wouldn't have happened.