What’s happening, RIGHT now, the elderly taking care of their own, demented, even more elderly parents! From the Front Page Sections, translated…
So Many of Them! There are, Over Ten Thousand Families in Chiayi with Demented Elderly, Forty-Eight Percent of the Caretakers are Aging, So Tiring! The Stresses from Taking Care of the Demented Elderly, are Two Times More than Just Caring for Elderly with a Progressive Condition.
Based off of statistics, there are, over 10,000 families in Chiayi with demented elderly, and, of these 84 percent are elderly caring for their elders, not only the demented are elderly, the caretakers’ average age is 72, elderly too; and, caretaking of demented elderly is way harder than caring for the elderly who’d lost their abilities to live on their own, “can’t do it anymore”, is how the elderly caretakers are, feeling.
The seventy-six year old Wen-Hsien Lin took care of his severely demented ninety-six-year-old mother for over eight years, they’re not well-to-do, and couldn’t afford a nurse, but, his older brother is aging, his younger brother has bad health, being divorced and single, singlehandedly, shouldered up the responsibilities for taking care of his demented mother. But the stresses from caretaking around the clock caused him to become depressed, and started having heart condition; he’d smiled bitterly, that the only time he can have a breather was when he goes to the hospitals to pick up his mother’s medications.
He said, that the tiredness from work, he can easily, sleep it off, but, the stresses from taking care of his own demented mother, tried him hard every single day. Once he’d taken his mother to the hospital for the checkups, the doctor told him, “your mother’s bodily function is quite well, she’s likely to live until she’s a hundred”. He didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry, because he doesn’t know how much longer he can last.
A charitable church foundation investigated, that if the eight-percent elderly being demented rate applied to the county and city of Chiayi, then, there would be, over 10,000 families like this, and, of these, forty-eight percent are with the aging taking care of the elderly, with the average age of caretakers being seventy-two, and, there were the aging children taking care of their elderly parents, and, the husbands and wives aging caring for the elderly are numerous too.
The Taiwanese Alzheimer’s Association estimated, that last year, the demented population broke 260,000, that five out of one older than eighty are demented, and, the elderly taking care of their elderly became, a norm now.
And so, this is, going to keep on, trending, because people are living longer, longer, and longer, and, there will be more who will be, diagnosed with dementia and other problems that happens, in the elderly years more and more…