Last night.
Fort Worth, Texas, USA.
Are you trying to suggest the President of the United States is senile…
The three congressmen to which Biden is referring: https://t.co/Ot3zV7nC2b pic.twitter.com/MeTwEjJ1AT
— Jake Schneider (@jacobkschneider) March 8, 2022
…ah.
This afternoon.
Dublin City Councillor and CEO of Inner City Helping Homeless Anthony Flynn tweetz:
“Society is failing our elderly!!!!
This morning we have been called to a lady who slept in the rain last night. The lady was soaked to the bone, is in her late 60s, suffering with dementia. She has been transported to hospital.
Thanks to the gardai and ambulance services.”
Meanwhile…
Met Éireann have forecast that temperatures could drop to -4C tomorrow night and Saturday night.
Earlier: Sad Café
Une Tete Disparait – a short by French director Franck Dion that explores the difficult subject of dementia (with no little elegance and empathy) though the story of a train journey to the seaside taken by the elderly protagonist, Jacqueline.
Gulp.
This afternoon.
Government Buidlings, Dublin 2
Independent TD Mattie McGrath (above) and former Ceann Comhairle Sean Barrett (middle) attest to attending the All-Party Oireachtas Group on Dementia’s third ‘Building Dementia Awareness in the Oireachtas’ – awareness training which is provided to TDs, Senators and their staff with insights on dementia.
Former Minister for Justice Nora Owen (top centre left) spoke at the event for the group which has has 23 Oireachtas members and run in partnership with The Alzheimer Society of Ireland (ASI).
Rollingnews
A scene from an A&E unit, taken secretly by RTÉ News recently
Further to the A&E crisis and ahead of the Irish Nurses and Midwife Organising holding a protest outside the Dáil tomorrow
“The cost of keeping an elderly person in an acute hospital bed is significantly less than in a nursing home, speaking purely in financial terms. There is, however, a much greater personal cost in terms of sleep deprivation, loss of personal dignity and control, and loss of social networks….the frail elderly person, often with some degree of dementia, will find this sleep deprivation to be even more terrifying than the fit young man with a leg fracture. They have no one with whom to develop a relationship, as the other patients constantly change and staff also change about. Those waiting – for three, four, or even more months – in these conditions to have central funding released to allow nursing home care might well be described as victims of institutional abuse. Remember that these people are also required to surrender 80 per cent of their liquid assets and continuing cash flow to obtain a “Fair Deal”.”
Patrick Plunkett, a clinical professor of emergency medicine at St James’s Hospital in Dublin, in today’s Irish Times
‘Granny dumping’ to blame for blocking beds, doctors warn (Philip Ryan, Sunday Independent)
Crisis in emergency departments (Irish Times letter page)
Previously: Corridors Of Power
In 1995, at the age of 61, when the London-based American artist William Utermohlen was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, he embarked on a series of self portraits in an attempt to document and understand the degenerative progression of his dementia.
Above: self portraits from 1967, 1996, 1997 (x2), 1998, 1999 and 2000, when the artist was finally admitted to a nursing home where he ceased painting and died seven years later.
After his death, his widow Patricia recalled, “Even the time he was beginning to be ill, he was always always drawing, every minute of the day. I say he died in 2000, because he died when he couldn’t draw any more. He actually died in 2007, but it wasn’t him by then.”
