How long can people live like this?

[HoppityBun]

This might seem callous, but I don’t mean it to be. The thing is, I’m bewildered about how long elderly, bedbound people in their 90s can continue to exist. I’ve got several relatives in this situation. One I know wishes that she had died several years ago: I know because she says so when her children aren’t around. One of the other others, actually it’s hard to tell but she focusses on the next meal, or tea, or sweets, and seems ok. Has a few UTIs and once had a very low breathing rate but was revived. The other, seems to be ok, but at other time seems to be sad and has twice commented that they “just wanted to be all over“.

They’re all in nursing homes, all mid 90s, all bedbound and I just don’t understand how it is that they continue to survive when they are not eating much and not getting any exercise. This has been going on since 2020 for one of them and 2-4 years for the other two.

It seems extraordinary to me and, to be honest, it’s getting family members down. I suppose it’s anticipatory grief, which we’re all warned against.

I’d be interested to know because the way things are going they could all live for another five or six years it seems to me. Gradually declining and getting thinner and paler, but just sort of existing. I don’t want that for myself and I hardly recognise them when I look at them, for the people they used to be. Has anybody else come across this? It’s particularly extraordinary because they’ve lived lives that I would have thought are contrary to all we told about healthy living. Granted, none of them ever drank or smoked, but none took any exercise that I remember. Yet still they are here.

How can the body go on existing?

It’s not for you to judge their lives. For all you know, they’re still enjoying TV/radio/chocolate/visits and don’t want to die. It’s all very well wishing for death when there’s no chance a relative can give the go-ahead for a medic to bear down on you with a big needle. It might be depression more than a genuine wish to die. Also, killing someone is not straightforward. See the botched execution with drugs in the US just now. And yes, OP, you do sound callous. They’re not ill, just old. Step away for a while if your thoughts are going down these paths.

I find the resultant discussion of euthanasia on this thread sinister and frightening. THIS is why people are against it. Relatives will be like “Oh, this is terrible for all concerned; just put us all out of our misery.” And if the patient is at all compos mentis, can you imagine the pressure they might feel to give in to euthanasia so that their families can get their lives back and maybe get their inheritance, too? Just no.

A relative has had a hip operation at 96.

She said she's never had a breast cancer screening - they start in your late 40s/50s so that's quite young to decide you wouldn't have the cancer treatment and die naturally!

Does this include the lady who says she left granny in a tent to die? Surely hers takes the top spot on the disgust level?

But for most people the choice won't be a binary option of "die with dignity" v "riddled with dementia". Only about 10% of people get dementia even in older age groups.

For a lot more people it's likely to be "I'll like decent cancer/heart failure treatment please" and "I'd like decent palliative care please" and "I'd like decent palliative end of life care please". None of which will be improved while assisted dying is an option. Let's spend money on improving actual health care and end of life care first and also help people with disabilities who have to fight for any kind of assistance.

I worry that if AD is an option that will become THE option if you get seriously ill over the age of 70. There are too many right wing nut jobs hanging about the offices of power these days and god help us if they get in.

You do know if they tell you though.

You are obviously missing the empathy gene lets just shoot the lot of them...maybe one day you may be injured in bed or lose an arm or leg or have a horrific accident, shall we shoot you too or is it just old people?

Yeah, exactly.

It's the American model. It doesnt work in a free at point of use system - it is destroying the NHS. Which is exactly what American health companies want. They are already circling like vultures.

Until our increasingly stupid population can have adult conversations about geriatric and end of life care, we are fkd.

Covid was an eye-opener because medicine had no solutions for nine months. It ripped through the elderly population, particularly those in nursing homes. Yet it was not for most people a fatal or deeply damaging infection. (I'm not underplaying how vicious it was.) It made me realise how drugs and vaccines are delaying the inevitable in the frail elderly. If we didn't have a massive flu and now Covid vaccine programme every year, many of those old people would die of pneumonia, as they used to, because the body has lost its ability to fight infection. I don't know why we are so deaf to what the body is telling us, and its own logic - in most cases, it's spent.

Sorry, I was editing while you posted. No, you don’t know. It’s one thing to say that when you know it won’t come to anything. It could well be depression talking, not a genuine wish to die. Maybe they aren’t getting enough visits.

Why don't you go back and re-read what that lady actually wrote? Your poor comprehension is depressingly predictable.

Yeah, the answer to the NHS’s problems is to take all the elderly out the back and shoot them, I agree!!!!

Maybe you could go first? Since you’re so keen to volunteer others’ lives to save the NHS.

Absolutely not for you to judge when someone else’s life is spent.

@HoppityBun there continuing to live the same way that chronically people who are bedbound carry on living.

Being bedbound isn’t an age thing.

And I sure hope you’re not saying that theyd be better dead. Unless you’re also happy to say that to much younger people too. Myself included.

Thanks for illustrating my last paragraph so beautifully.

Ps: I have an illness that will leave me bedridden in a home potentially for years. I'm hoping for a heart attack long before then, mostly because I'm a realist and not selfish enough to think that a demented, drooling, doubly incontinent 80 year old me deserves £400,000 funding my care when it can be used to fund education for young people and cancer treatment for 40 year olds.

I agree with you 100%

With regards to the why - follow the money.... big pharma making a fortune keeping the elderly and infirm alive; care homes and care providers making plenty of money too.

But who do you think should judge?
I think it should be the owner that life. I think I should be able to say now, sane, still working, still capable of planning ahead, 'do not prolong my life when I have lost my dignity and independence. I value those 2 things more than life.'

Your opening post made me think of a conversation I had with mum recently when I asked her about results of blood tests (she has had three trying to find out various information). She just stated that she doesn't actually care about the results. She will be 90 next year. She has pain most of the time now, takes lots of meds, has carers in every morning (not other times though, can manage 'fine') but won't go outside shopping/cafe unless she has to. She has dementia too and I see changes to her behaviour. I live several hundred miles away so see her for chunks of time rather than every day/week. I think she has had enough and frankly, I can see why. What does her future hold? More pain, dementia?

It’s good it’s being discussed.

it’s hard to talk about it with people who have no experience of it.

my neighbour was in her 90s and in bed for the last 3 years. Didn’t really eat at al she was just a skeleton and when she died her daughter was so ‘shocked’ she kept saying how stunned she was and she though she just needed a boost of some vitamins. How the woman was still alive is what I was shocked at. I’m amazed at how long people can stay alive, it’s incredible really.

So everyone without mental capacity should be euthanised? Is there an age limit or is this population-wide?

@bafta16 Good for them, if they are fit and mentally well. Good luck!

When you're doubly incontinent, unable to speak, unable to recognise the children you brought into the world, unable to feed yourself, weigh five stone, lie sleeping all day, and are entirely reliant on a cocktail of drugs and vaccines and spoonfuls of calorie-dense mush being pushed into your mouth to keep the body still ticking over and on this side of mortality...yes, I would judge that life is spent.

But you are correct that no-one else has the 'right' to make this decision. This is why advance directives matter, but people in their 90s now would have had little awareness of such a thing. I do remember the line, 'don't let me go like that' being uttered a lot though, when elderly relatives were suffering their own degrading decline.

@FashionPassion you are delusional if you think people in this position are happy to keep going, and that the only thing getting them down is the thought that they’re a burden. In general, the people who live to their 90s are those who were always pretty healthy and active, so they feel the pain even more when they can’t do anything for themselves.

These aren’t the Captain Toms of the world. They’re not the jolly feisty 100 year old women we hear about. They’re the frail elderly who can’t do anything for themselves, as their bodies have packed up. All the people in that situation who I’ve met just want it to be over.

When someone is very old and has advanced dementia, is doubly incontinent, unable to recognise any of their family or hold any sort of conversation, IMO it absolutely IS fine for relatives to judge whether there should be hospital/ABs/drips, etc., to keep them going.

How many people, if asked, would say they would want to be kept going when in that sort of state?