How To Leave A Nursing Home

The unvarnished truth is that when somebody lives in a nursing home their next address is usually the cemetery.

I am proud of the two exceptions I have known.

One was my own father-in-law of blessed memory, a life-long smoker afflicted with COPD. He was the first recipient of my tapping lessons (Emotional Freedom Technique) who tapped on his own acupuncture meridians successfully enough to improve his breathing.

He told me there was nothing else to do all day in a nursing home.

He also said, long before, that he deserved top notch “stud” fees for having fathered three tall, strong, strapping Kansas men, one of whom I led down the garden path to California.

At any rate, the former publisher of the Mid-Kansas Ruralist lived out his days in a private apartment in the Kansas City area, with some visiting family and professional assistance.

Now there is my dear friend Francoise, my dance teacher’s dance teacher in the California desert, former principal ballerina in an international company.

Now this Frenchwoman born and bred sounds forty years younger than last week. She has been living for the past two weeks at the home of her student, the gifted dance-mistress of the desert, apparently singing her granddaughter to sleep with ancient lullabies of revolutionary France.

Francoise’s student and “adoptive daughter” took her off her “thyroid medicine” (probably too high a dose as she was constantly losing weight) and doubtless a “synthetic,” and placed her instead on a natural regimen (she promised to send me her internet sources) and is feeding Francoise more palatably. She has already put on 1 1/2 pounds.

As a former nursing home consultant, I can certainly attest to most folks in nursing homes appearing to be at least a bit overmedicated, and everyone in a nursing home being left on the same medications indefinitely with precious little regard for how they are doing.

I knew Francoise’s nursing home doctor. Let’s just say he was better known for the quantity of the patients he covered than for the quality of his visits.

Francoise asked me to help her continue to get tutoring on the use of a cell phone.

She is now in her 80s, for the first time in her life, studying tap dancing.  You can read more of my interesting and inspiring stories on Facebook.