Theresa Judge meets a woman who does not want a change of address. Living in her own home is essential to her health and happiness
Seventy-two year old Kay Cunningham talks about the Home First scheme as if it was a blessing from God rather than a service elderly people might have a right to expect. After a long stay in Beaumont Hospital she thought she'd never be able to live at home again. She could have become just another elderly person accused of taking up a bed in an acute hospital. Luckily for her, she was one of the few who had her wishes taken into account.
"I couldn't believe it when I found out that I couldn't come back home. It's not the same anywhere else. When I was in the nursing home, what was I like? I used to be crying and all," she says. "But now I'm sorted out and I'm grand again, thank God, for another while."
Kay has had rheumatoid arthritis for 25 years and has endured chronic pain and numerous operations - a hip replacement, two knee replacements and she had to get a steel bar inserted in her neck after a vertebrae cracked. She has also recently lost the sight in one eye as a result of the arthritis.
"You name it, I have it," she says. But remarkably she hasn't lost her sense of humour. "Oh, the arthritis loves my body, it eats away at it."
She sits slightly hunched and her hands, twisted from arthritis, lie idle as she leans forward to sip her drink from a straw. Her hair has been done and her turquoise nightdress is immaculate. She is sitting beside her bed in the front room of her Coolock home where's she's lived for nearly 30 years.
She was born and lived in Dublin's north inner city for most of her life. On the walls around are pictures of her children and grandchildren. "I'd great happy years here." Sometimes she just sits and remembers those years -"sure that's all you have is your memories" - the smiles on her children's faces as they woke up as toddlers, the years when they were coming in from school and the days the family spent on Portmarnock strand.
Before that life she worked for seven years as an usherette in the Capital cinema off O'Connell Street. "I had my torch and I had to show people into their seats. In those days people used to queue for hours to get into the cinema. It was a fabulous place."
Kay insists she can joke and keep her spirits up because she is in her own house. She says most of the nursing homes she was in over the years were "beautiful places" but she couldn't be as content in them.
There are the small things like not being able to listen to your radio in the middle of the night if you wake and can't get back to sleep, not being able to watch the TV programmes you like because somebody else might have other ideas, and the human reality that there are just as likely to be personality clashes and petty prejudices in a nursing home as anywhere else.
In one home she befriended a woman who was feeling terribly isolated because for some unknown reason a group of other residents had decided they didn't want to mix with her.
She loves the different nurses and care workers coming in and out - helping her get dressed and washed in the morning, preparing her meals, giving her medication and preparing her for bed again in the evening.
She tells them what she's been hearing on the radio and they tell her about their lives. The Filipino nurses tell her about their country. "We can have a laugh about things and a cry about some of the sad things that happen as well."
As well as coping with arthritis, Kay had to deal with the sadness of her husband's death. He died 12 years ago from skin cancer aged only 62.
"He was a fine, big healthy man but he was gone in a year and a half. And he used to always say, 'Kay, don't worry, I always look after you.'" But she says she has plenty of company. It's easier for her children and grandchildren to visit when she's at home. A neighbour arrives with a loaf of bread, just one of a number of people who regularly drops in as they are passing.
She says she wouldn't have the same company in a nursing home, that it would be harder for people to arrange visits. She also feels she has some independence once she's in her own house and she can manage to do things that she wouldn't be allowed to do in a nursing home. "If I take my time I can get out of bed myself, but in a nursing home I'd have to be calling for someone because they'd be afraid I'd fall."
Kay is certainly clear about what she wants and it doesn't seem like a lot for her or anybody else in her situation to ask for. "Oh, I hope I die from here. I wouldn't like to go anywhere - oh no, I want to stop here for as long as possible."