So, for a while, my grandmother (who is in her mid-80s) has been in and out of the hospital. It started when she fell in her kitchen and scrapped herself up pretty good. Since then she has claimed to have fallen in her apartment several times - each time ending up in the hospital.
It turns out that this was a lie. She had not fallen and she was just using the hospital to get attention from her family.
Okay, a little background. My grandmother has always been a little bit, no, scratch that...a lot manipulative. She has always been the first person to lay a guilt trip on somebody. It wouldn't matter how many times you visited with her or went over to see her, it would never be enough. And while you were visiting, you would be treated to all the gossip about everyone else - even people you didn't know. This talking behind other's back has cost her a friend that she had had for 25 years, but that is another story.
This leads to now, with her being in the hospital. While in the hospital she starts not only playing up the "can't walk" thing (yet refuses a wheelchair) but also starts telling falsehoods of neglect to the nursing staff. This leads to the staff calling in a caseworker from the state. She lied and said that her family never checks on her or visits her.
Grandma is assigned the caseworker and the woman calls all grandma's children (one being my mother). She tells my mother, my aunt and my uncle that grandma needs round the clock care and that they have 24 hours to figure out what to do with her.
Well, my aunt lives in a cramped trailer over 2 hours away, my mother is nursing a broken knee and is in the process of moving and my uncle - well, he has frickin' power of attorney over grandma, which is why he checks on her damn near ever day. But Grandma lied about people visiting her, so therefore the state thinks that the family is neglecting an old woman. This despite the fact that my uncle and my cousin, D, check on her on a daily basis and my other cousin, W, drives her around.
So, due to all her lies, she no longer can go back to her apartment. The apartment where she had a lot of freedom to do what she wanted to do and all the independence to do it. Now, the state is going to send her right from the hospital to a nursing home. One in which she has to be signed in and signed out and they dictate the schedule.
Well, I hope that she is satisfied with what her lying has given her in the end. I am quite sure that it was not her expected outcome. I can just shake my head at the situation. She didn't want to go to a home when the family asked her before, and now, she will probably end up in the same one where she committed her own mother. Irony, this has it.
So, the moral of the story is: don't lie. See, people will find out and it will come back to bite you (even if it takes a while). I wish I had sympathy for her, but knowing what a liar she is...it may seem awful of me, but I just don't.
I am sure the family can fight the state on the case of neglect to get her back into her apartment, but you know, she has so many of us burned out and just burned now, that I don't know how many of us give a damn. Hell, maybe in the nursing home she will have whatever she wants now - people who she can talk trash to about other people and the opportunity to bitch to us how she is being treated. I hate to say it, but I don't recognize this woman any longer and I really don't like who she has become.
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