Another Reason to Shoot Yourself Before You End up in a Nursing Home: Lots of the Workers are Criminals

I suppose pretty much everyone knows this already, that criminals end up working at nursing homes. Click the post title to read the story citing new statistics.

Where every other industry might have some standards, the industries caring for the vulnerable often have one standard: making money for the owner. If this means hiring people who have been convicted of drug offenses and criminal offenses that include burglary even crimes against persons, they'll do it.

I worked at nursing homes during my brief college career to make ends meet, including the one behind which I'm now trapping unwanted cats in Corvallis. I'm not surprised they're unwanted there.

When I worked there in the 80's, the place should have been closed for criminal neglect. I worked nightshift. Often there was no laundry aide and no adult diapers and two employees only. It was a nightmare.

We were not given gloves to change and clean up human feces and it was unbelievably sad to see once independent vibrant human beings laying in their own feces, covered in bedsores, unable to ever get out of bed. We were pushed relentlessly by admin, and were not supposed to stop and take time to talk to the terribly lonely old.

It was a joke later, that half the employees smoked pot on their breaks out back. I quit. Employees routinely would not show up for work, so they'd call the reliables, the gullibles in, until the overtime hours were unbearable.

The job is also physically stressful in that the homes I worked in back then did not have lift equipment which meant employess lifted dead weight routinely, and sometimes, dangerously, on their own, because of lack of staffing.

It was depressing beyond depressing to work at such a place.

I never want to end up in a nursing home. I hope not to have a stroke, that would limit my ability, at my end, to pull a trigger, slash with a knife, step off a cliff, whatever I needed to do to keep out of ending up waiting to die at any place like most American nursing homes.

I cannot imagine any dignified human being who would want their life to end like that.
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