Bus stop, wet day, she's there I say

Good Lord, Thursday already and no post since Monday, I’m really falling behind on my post a day thing, sorry.
However it is the ‘silly season’ and even the MSM are struggling to fill pages.

But this particular story caught my eye (and my sense of humour)

Fake bus stop keeps Alzheimer's patients from wandering off

German nursing homes are using a novel strategy to stop Alzheimer's patients from wandering off: phantom bus stops.

Now before you say, “Pavlov’s Cat you sick f**ker, how can you find anything amusing in that”

Let me tell you that my Grandfather recently spent the last of his days in one of these places (in the UK) and this was after we’d tried to keep him at home far longer than others do.

All I have to say is that, if you didn’t laugh, you’d just cry yourself out.

Having lived there for a time the Germans are obsessed with ‘Civil Liberties’ and who can blame them, yet having to walk past Frankfurt Station with the Police watching addicts ‘cook up’ heroin on the pavement, they may have taken it too far.

But I digress.

And so even people with advanced dementia can not be constrained by any means there. Yet in the home my Grandad was in, you needed a PIN number to get out and were told to shield it (like cash machine) when you left and it was changed regularly.

An bit of an aside; When Grandad was first admitted, it was all new, I turned up to visit one day, got buzzed in. and was met by a smartly dressed lady of later years, but not elderly, who said to me.

“Hello, could you let me out, I’ve forgotten the code for the door and could you tell me if the bus to Bromley leaves from the stop outside”

I was just about to let the lady out, but using my keen deductive skills (on a par with Sherlock Holmes) I noticed that she was carrying 3 handbags in her left hand and two in her right. ‘Aha I thought this is either a brazen handbag thief or a resident’. “I’m sorry” I told her, “I’ve forgotten it myself, you’ll have to go to the office”. I said ‘Hello’ later and she’d forgotten all about me.

I digressed again heaven help me.

What I liked about the article was was the juxtaposition of the views, the head of the care home and the far more realistic views of the Old Farts (Lions) Club.

On the one hand we have

Benrath's director Richard Neureither.

“It can be particularly dangerous if this happens in winter and they spend the night out in the cold.
Without powers to detain patients, “We cannot and must not run after people and lock them up,”

So if they freeze to death, get run over, murdered etc. NOT MY FAULT

And yet a far more pragmatic view from the Old Guard

Our members are 84 years-old on average. Their short-term memory hardly works at all, but the long-term memory is still active. They know the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting there means they will go home.” The result is that errant patients now wait for their trip home at the bus stop, before quickly forgetting why they were there in the first place.

I know who I want looking after me when I eventfully go mad as fish and it’s not someone like Herr Neureither

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