JUST PHILOSOPHISING - ON BEING SUFFOCATED BY CONSIDERATIONS FOR MY SAFETY. PART 5.

Confronting the challenges of being there with probably less support and more concerns of others about my safety, my welfare. 

Than being here, in this nursing home, confronting the challenges of making it 'my home', and how to cope with being deprived of my freedom. 

My liberty and my independence, however precariously I might have managed, had I been allowed to remain in 'my own home.'

And so does my world, and the external world in which I live, become more contracted and smaller. 

Which does not really help and provide me with the opportunities to increase and prolong my level of cognitive and social functioning.

It does not help that I am a woman of a certain age, who, in my retirement, has not worked for a wage for many years, and have long become accustomed to the quiet life I like. 

With friend having been lost through the consequences of the changes they and I have had to make in our lives, as the years rapidly come and go. 

Changes which have been brought about through, like me, friends growing older, being afflicted by the ailments and disabilities which prey on older folks, until they succumb and pass on. 

So that now, the friends I have and who are among the living, I can count on less than two hands. 

And I must now rely on members of my family, and on the workers in this nursing home in which I find myself. 

Find myself having to live, at time against my better inclination and at other times, in a state of acceptance.

And I often, if not always find myself asking the same questions: Why am I here? 

Why am I not able to go home to my own house and home? 

And I am given the same answers, repeatedly, even as I repeatedly ask the same questions. 

I am told I am not well; that I am suffering from Vascular dementia. That I cannot look after myself, I will not be able to care for myself. 

That the 'authorities', 'the government', have decided that I need to be in a nursing home

To be continued.