Guardian article today that might resonate here

Wr had a lot of really unpleasant meetings with care home staff and GPs that required a lot of energy but we prevented hospital admissions. At one home they quite obviously hated us. So be it. You can do it if you’re prepared to struggle hard enough. What I strongly believe is that we shouldn’t have had to fight that hard - frankly it should be the norm.

Great minds and all that!

I think the Covid/ flu vaccinations are a slightly different decision to antibiotics or not. I’ve considered whether to give or not the former with DM but in the end, decided it was better to protect others (carers and their other clients) by her being protected, than not protecting her. Though a dose of flu may be a much kinder option than years of very slow decline when she really really wants to die

Im surprised no-one has suggested a Covid/ flu party - in the same vein that chicken pox parties used to be a thing 😱

i don’t know what the answer is. MIL was diagnosed with severe osteoporosis and Parkinson’s . She declined quite rapidly but FIL was in denial throughout. He didn’t want to see it and had everyone jumping around to try and ‘fix’ her. She went into care home during Covid (doubly incontinent and immobile by this point) and he visited her daily for years. He spoke about her like nothing was wrong - told us she’d been ‘quite chatty’, that she’d enjoyed lasagne for lunch and they’d watched tv together. The reality was that she mumbled a few random words, wasn’t obviously distressed, managed to suck down a few mouthfuls of liquidised lasagne and was then sat in front of a blasting tv set to a cartoon or afternoon quiz show (that she’d never have watched previously). He was so so unwilling to prepare to let her go or even think about life without her. This went on for years 😟. When she finally began to decline further and get repeated chest infections, he and SIL were still agreeing to Covid and flu vaccinations, antibiotics etc. When she could no longer tolerate oral antibiotics, they agreed to intravenous administration but the nurses found that this was impossible too, and she was finally allowed to die. Even near the end, SIL was talking about her ‘rallying’ and ‘coming back’ - to what? Her miserable existence?

It’s so selfish to keep a person locked in that state just to avoid dealing with the pain of their death. Everyone dies - every single one of us. Every person I have loved or love now is going to die. We have to accept that. When my SIL told me that MIL had ‘rallied’ and taken a sip of water, the look of horror on my face probably offended her. I couldn’t help it, I just couldn’t / can’t understand why she would want to prolong that horrible existence.

X post with @MaturingCheeseball Or cross sentiments!

In the last year I’ve seen a rash of articles with headlines such as “is this the key to living to 150?” , “we might soon have the key to live even longer” etc etc. And I just think “to what end?” What sort of life would it be? Are we then going to start the ailments of old age? Or will we be living that long with accumulating health issues, poor mobility, incontinence, dementia etc? And then what when we get to 150? Will we be looking to live for another 50 years by then? Do we want science to make that possible? Or are we all going to be happy to die at 150?

I know these articles are largely click bait, but living and living and living seems to be being fetishised.

I read that increasing numbers of people will be living to 120. But that may be with thirty or more years of poor health, and indeed maybe twenty with advanced dementia.

We may well have two generations in care at the same time. It will bankrupt every nation with social provision.

I thoroughly agree that it’s the artificial extending of life which is the problem. Mil had dementia for some years, quite a few of them as a doubly incontinent vegetable - not knowing her own name or who her dcs were. She had to be lifted by hoist and turned frequently. Every time she had an infection/pneumonia the nursing home rushed her off to hospital, where she was intravenously pumped with antibiotics for a few days before going back for more months,nay years of a miserable existence. The dnr only pertains to heart attacks, not treatable illness.

fil was given a hip replacement at 95 when he had dementia. He had no idea what was going on.

My grandad had appalling dementia. He was in terrible distress for the last 5-6 years of his life. He was double incontinent and clearly utterly tormented. By the time he died he barely weighed a few stone. But still my grandma kept insisting he had antibiotics for infections. It was awful to watch.

Then there's my granny. She's 91 and in permanent pain. She can't take ibuprofen because she's on blood thinners. She can't take opiates because they make her dizzy and if she falls she'll end up entirely unable to walk and the small modicum of independence she still has will be gone (she currently lives alone with clients coming in one a week, a carer twice a week and her daughter 3x a week). She seems basically happy to die but won't stop taking the blood thinners in case she has a stroke that doesn't kill her. Her fear is not of death but of further disablement.

I really hope that I can just have euthanasia if I get to her age. It's no life at all.

I’m not in fact pro assisted dying. I think it’s irrelevant to all of the situations we are talking about here, and it brings a whole load of new problems.

There’s a very good reason why nurses used to call pneumonia the Old Man’s Friend.

I wouldn't encourage anyone to do that. It needs to be a personal choice. But I am certainly hoping it's an option for me when the time comes.

Reading this thread am struck by the fact assisted dying /euthanasia is likely to become legal and maybe an option you can all encourage your burdensome parents to take.

I think the generation the author is talking about, ie people in currently in their late forties and fifties, are the first whose own parents had it easy.

Of my four grandparents (born in the Edwardian era), three were enthusiastic and lifelong smokers, and they died of cancer/heart disease. I'm not advocating smoking and I'm very sorry that I didn't get to know two of them, both having died when I was a baby. My other granny lived until she was 92 and endured 12 years of dementia, which caused my mother a lot of stress. So it's lifestyle changes that are driving this longevity, though the mania for keeping very old people alive with cocktails of drugs/vaccines/surgery is a new development. Doctors now seem to be in denial of the fact that natural decline is an essential part of life and death and aggressively militate against it.

I think the lengthy keeping alive of people with no quality of life is the point here.

Without major medical intervention, my DF would have been dead at 54 from a heart attack. Who know which of DMs fractures would have finished her off - probably the femur when she was 60ish due to immobility and infection. FIL would have been gone aged 60 from his heart attack.

My best mates nasty grandmother (racist, homophobic, misogynistic and absolutely horrible person, happy to share stories to demonstrate) had dementia and survived 9 years in a care home spitting her bile at the poor staff and being utterly miserable in every aspect of life. The dementia brought out every horrible aspect of her personality and the filter was gone, and she became the worst person she could have ever tried to be. Repeated pneumonias, UTIs, unknown infections were treated in hospital with multiple admissions every year. To what end? It certainly didn't benefit her or improve her quality of life.

But didn’t people in the past just have this issue but earlier on and then die earlier themselves)?

I think the generation the author is talking about, ie people in currently in their late forties and fifties, are the first whose own parents had it easy.

The author’s grandparents died say in their mid seventies ( with no dementia etc) and the children ( ie the author’s parents) then had from their mid forties onwards “free”.
But this wouldn’t necessarily have been the case for the author’s great grandparents etc

A pacemaker for a sick 89 year old with dementia. No wonder the NHS is in the state it is.

When my father was 89 he collapsed at home and was taken to hospital where he had another episode in the middle of the night and he was fitted with a pacemaker. When the hospital told me what they’d done I felt a wave of despair rush over me. My mother had died two years before and his physical and mental health declined dramatically leaving me and my sisters to coordinate his care. He was deaf so couldn’t manage phone calls, he kept locking himself out of his computer and online banking because he couldn’t remember his passwords. He was utterly miserable and frequently said he wanted to die. By fitting his pacemaker the doctors condemned him to another three years of inexorable decline. After a run of hospital admissions for falls (one time he only managed six hours at home before being taken back in) the discharge coordinator told us we needed to find a care home for him. He hated the home and essentially gave up, wouldn’t even try to get out of bed and became doubly incontinent. After a year he developed pneumonia and died a couple of days later. If he’d dropped dead five years earlier we’d have all been desperately sad but with a feeling that it had been a life well-lived. As it was when he died my main feeling was one of profound relief.

It sounds like your dad has capacity and understands his plight @GenerousGardener. Does he have the ability to refuse the medication that is keeping him alive? Surely it's his choice, it's everyone's choice to say no, I will not take these pills, injections or whatever. It's all absolutely horrible, but surely if we believe in 'bodily autonomy' in the case of women choosing to have abortions etc, that should also extend to our right not to take life-extending medicines when we have no quality of life. So awful for him and you having to witness his suffering. 💐

My old dad is 92. He can’t hear or see, he has many many ailments and is kept alive by medication and his very caring wife. When I pop round to see him, he tells me that he can’t see, can’t hear, can’t do anything, why am I still here. He’s told me many times that he just wants to die. He’s clearly very unhappy, but there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. I feel for my old dad.

My mil, by contrast is in a care home. She’s 93, doubly incontinent, can’t walk, but likes to order the staff round like they were her servants. She moans about everyone and everything. She’s gonna live forever. Although I’m just the dil I get all the stress and poison aimed at me. I’m waiting for a call from the care home…,she will probably outlive me.

It occurs to me that the whole development of the LPA system has become a double-edged sword for Generation X, the one above Gen X and generations below.

This article gave me permission to feel something I've been reluctant to admit out loud. The weight isn't just the practical load — it's the anticipatory dread. Waiting for the call. Wondering if today is the day something goes wrong. That low-level background hum that never quite switches off.
The point that this is a genuinely new phenomenon doesn't get made enough. There's so much guilt attached to finding it hard, as if previous generations managed it without complaint. But they didn't face the same thing. People didn't survive for years in serious decline the way they do now. Previous generations dropped dead relatively quickly. The comparison isn't fair to anyone carrying this right now.
The LindorDoubleChoc post resonated — dreading every Sunday, anticipating the call. That's such an honest thing to name. Not the emergency itself, but the endless low-level weight of it.