Pushing the years

In lecture this week we discussed taking care of the elderly. Seeing how our population base is getting older and older, and since my parents are in the beginning of pushing their years, I thought this topic pretty relevant.

The professor was talking about the issue of what to do when you believe your patient should not be driving anymore, ie) when you may have to take his or her license away. The ability to drive is very liberating; the idea of taking away that freedom is actually quite depressing. I remember a patient while I was on psych that was a 70 year old woman who we were consulted on to assess her capacity for decision making. She wanted to leave the hospital and go home---not to a living facility that her medicine team was trying to set up. She was able to answer our questions---although most of the them were wrong--she just made stuff up. Once we figured this out and found out that she still drove---but not much, only to the bar and back---we were a bit worried about her (and the rest of the drivers out there). It was difficult but we recommended that the medicine team consider to take her drivers license away (I dont really know why we didn't do it ourselves). And we also recommended some anti-alcohol therapy since her driving to the bar excursion happened daily and not weekly.

The professor brought up a patient of his----a father, son situation where the father had severe alzheimers--he wasn't able to remember day from day. The son and doc both believed it was time to prevent the father from ever getting behind the wheel, even though it was one of the father's favorite activities. So instead of making a big to do about it, before they went anywhere, the son would just say, "Dad, I really like to drive too, and since you got to drive yesterday, I think today I should get a turn." The father being a sharing loving man would always say alright.

The son said that to him everyday.