Elderly Prepping: Nursing Homes & SHTF

Can you think of a worse situation to be in than stuck in a nursing home if the Stuff Hits The Fan (SHTF)? There are a couple of worse places (prison comes to mind) but not many. 

Let’s look at the problem and start thinking about ways of dealing with loved ones in nursing homes if the SHTF in this second article in our ElderlyCare series.

Nursing Homes Require Massive Resources To Operate

Spice and I are members of our local governmental inter-agency emergency response organizations, and we do yearly table-top exercises to explore various problems and solutions. 

A recent year’s scenario was a massive ice storm that knocked out power for weeks (something that is not only possible, but probable in our area at some point in time).

Our scenario started on Day 8 of the disaster, and one of the first things I started working on as my part of the project was how to get a continuous supply of diesel fuel to our local nursing home. Our nursing home has a backup generator system, but that system is designed to keep the home operational for days, not weeks. By doing an analysis (I hopped in my car, drove over to the nursing home which was right across the street from the office we were doing the exercise in, looked at the diesel storage tanks size as well as sizing the generators), then I googled that generator to find out how much fuel it burned under 60 percent load per hour). 

My calculations showed that the generators would operate from 4-5 days at that load level.

The nursing home has a steam powered boiler system for head, which is powered by natural gas… that’s fine for this scenario, but for other scenarios (earthquake, for example, when the natural gas pipeline would likely break somewhere along the way) it’s a REAL problem.

What does all this mean?

If the power goes out, people at the nursing home start to die almost immediately. If the heat goes out, people at the nursing home again start to die almost immediately. There’s a whole lot of “if this happens” to list that are followed by the worlds “people at the nursing home start to die almost immediately”.

Many, many people in care at nursing home and similar facilities are in seriously ill, and any interruption of power, heat, cooling, medical care, medicines, food, water and sanitation will bring on a wave of deaths in the facility. 

There’s just no way around that.

Hard thoughts about hard times

Here’s where it gets hard. 

Where’s do we draw the line in providing resources to people who are that ill?

Obviously, I think pretty much everybody would agree that in a regional ice storm, we would make every effort to get diesel to the generators for the nursing home to get them through what will be a relatively short-term outage.

That’s not the question.

The question is one of resources… at what point in time do we have to stop pouring resources into an isolated facility like a nursing home and instead come up with another option.

In the novel “One Second After” this comes up early in the book, where the book protagonist’s father-in-law is in the nursing home, and the family goes and brings him home. If you think what I have mentioned here in this article is a bit haunting, read that book… it will definitely leave a mark in your mind about this and many other issues.

When times are good, we all want our nursing homes to be “the best”, we want everything that can be done for our elderly who live there to be done. If the SHTF? Unless we have family in the nursing home, how big of a priority is it going to be for us? Honestly, for most people, it won’t be.

Personal Experience

In the fist part of this series, I told the story about my mother and how she ended up in a nursing home.

My sister did a great job of supporting her in the nursing home and taking care of as much as she could, and if the SHTF my sister could have gotten my mother out of there and taken our mother home with her.

The problem would have become “well, now what”, because at that point in her life, mother needed asssistance for her daily needs… she needed rehab, regular doctor care (including a wound specialist) and medication that she wouldn’t have been able to get if the SHTF.

Leaving our mother in a post SHTF nursing home would be a death sentence, but in our case, taking her home to one of our houses would also have been a death sentence.

Sometimes There Is No Good Option

We as preppers have to face the fact that there are some things we simply don’t have the resources to prep for. 

The situation with my mother? Yes, we could have fed her, we could have provided sanitary care, but the nursing and medical care she would have needed? We aren’t nurses or doctors.

I’ve thought about this a lot since my mother passed… and have thought about our other parents and how they passed (we have lost all four of our parents), and how we would have dealt with any of them.

My father died of an un-diagnosed condition in a foreign country, my father-in-law had a myriad of health problems and was on oxygen for years, and my mother-in-law died quickly of a sudden onset of cancer. Both of our mothers required serious amounts of pain medication to ease their journey.

If that happens to one of us, when there is no pain medicine, what do we do? What CAN we do?

I know what Spice or I would do in a SHTF situation where our loved one is suffering in extreme and incurable pain, and I think if you consider it for a minute, you know what we would/will do as well… but as much as I blog about our lives, I’m going to keep that private. That’s a decision we have to make, and that’s a decision you may have to make as well. 

Man, this is bleak, isn’t it? 

Sometimes, life IS bleak… and nobody gets out of it alive.

So What Can We Do?

What we can do is honestly evaluate our situations as time goes by, and make adjustments to our lives and our living situation as we or our beloved relatives age. 

We think ahead of time what would happen if we have to go get mom or grandpa out of a nursing home, take our loved one home and care for them. We think of the supplies needed, we think of things like mobility issues and how to work around them. 

Some Ideas Of Where To Start

I’ve got some ideas that we can try that might help getting this ball rolling if we expect to need to care for somebody frail if the SHTF:

• Find out exactly what medicine our senior takes, find out why they are taking them and what each med does.
• Start looking for a way to stockpile as much of that medicine as possible (this may be difficult), and find out alternative medicines and therapies for times the medicine isn’t available.
• Get a supply as large of washable cloth diapers.
• Buy a bed pan
• Order several portable bidet bottles (the are very useful for all kinds of situations, not just cleaning poop).
• If you have a spare room with a single bed, think about replacing that with a hospital bed instead.
• Consider purchase of a lift recliner.

We Need To Consider Quality Of Life Issues In Our Plans

The typical “survivalist” message is to “survive at all costs”, and both Spice and I think that in some cases, that’s a fallacy.

There are times when dying is better than hanging onto life, for example when intense pain is involved in a terminal care patient. 

Everybody dies. You will die. I will die. Spice will die.

That’s just a part of being human. This is something that we need to consider, and it’s hard to think about…

But even in the dying process there can be hope, love, fellowship and memories.

Sometimes, One Last Good Day Is What You Have

Here’s an example. Spice’s mother suddenly and unexpected started feeling very “off” so she went to the doctor, and the diagnosis she got was as bad as it can be. She had advanced, stage 4 lung cancer that had already spread everywhere. 

We all rushed in from all over the country to be with her, because we knew her time of lucidity would be very, very short.

It was right before Christmas, and all “the girls” of the family spent the afternoon of the last good day with Spice’s mom in her room, building a ginger bread house. They were able to laugh, share, and in a sense be there for each other for one last, long goodbye.

Her mom wanted to concentrate on living what life she had left to the fullest, surrounded by her loved ones.

Sometimes, that’s all we have. 

A final thought

This is a really hard subject even in the best of times, as we all may/will someday have to make hard choices about ourselves and our loved ones.

The takeaway I want to leave people is to consider, when doing all this prepping and survival stuff that we do, is to not forget “quality of life” when making your plans.

The poet Dylan Thomas put it this way in his amazing work, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”….

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

As poignant and heartfelt as that is, I think it’s also (depending on the situation) selfish and even wrong.

Surviving, or keeping people alive at all costs no matter how much pain they may be in, is something we need to think long and hard about… as we prep to help improve the quality of life for those who are in their silver years. 

If we can make the life of a senior loved one better by prepping for them, then isn’t that about as good of a gift as you could give them? Isn’t that a great way to show how much they mean to you, how much you care about them?