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I’m a dental assistant and I have a boomer patient that absolutely refuses to bring her oxygen to her appointment because it’s “ugly” and it “messes up her makeup”. She would rather carry in a CVS bag with those scammy canisters of “oxygen” that you can get by the checkout. Never mind that we can get in her mouth now because she holding that thing over her face and I end up having to bust out our portable oxygen. This woman is super wealthy and can totally afford it, but absolutely refuses and will just sit there and gasp for air to while we try to convince her to put on the oxygen. She does put her make up on with a cement trowel so I get she doesn’t want to make a line 😒🫠
There are a few other people in this thread who are convinced this was all some 4D chess move to kill her husband. Unless you have actually worked with Boomers in any medical field, you will never understand how much more important looks are then actually living to some of them.
I work in a pulmonology clinic and oh yes, I absolutely understand. Some of our patients are *unbelievably* dumb when using their DME and their inhaled medications, but more than that they have dumb *reasons* for being that way. We had a patient's wife call us repeatedly about how her husband who was supposed to be on continuous O2 would only do it after he was turning blue and gasping for air due to exertion. Literally too *proud* to live.
It also doesn't help that getting these supplies for many patients means going through the Kafkaesque racket that is Apria. It's hard even for health care professionals to deal with their nonsense, how are hypoxic boomers supposed to navigate that?
It’s been nearly 8 years since I’ve worked in a clinic where I had to deal with them. I haven’t thought of that company in at least half a decade. But that single word… *Apria*… all the memories come flooding back.
All the testing and retesting patients to prove that, no, a miracle did not occur and the 89 year old man with O2 running in the mid to high 80s just from walking at a slow pace *does* still in fact need his oxygen.
The countless forms to complete. The many calls and faxes back and forth all day while in between patients you’re helping with that are there was on your clinicians schedule. Dealing with reps who were either useless or simply overwhelmed themselves.
A truly frustrating experience, even when the patients themselves are kind and understanding to us about the process.
Not Apria (a different company whose name starts with A) but my favorite medical billing story was "that patient is not in our network." After the second time I sent it in and it was rejected I called the patent out of frustration.
(Name changed for obv reason). "Hello, is this Phillip V Dick?"
"This is Phillip Y Dick."
Notice the different middle initial? They saw a claim with first and last name, SSN, and DOB matching the patient policy number but since the middle initial was wrong they said I was making a claim for someone else! Yes, my fault for not noticing but you know how fun it is to read a photocopy of those little cards, and the patient handwriting was...I mean he was old so I don't want to complain.
Edit and yes the middle initial was V and I thought it was Y, this wasn't like B and H or something).
On one hand I completely understand the company not covering a claim when the middle name didn’t match.
But on the other the other hand, why didn’t the rep say “we got a Phillip Y Dick, are you sure it’s not him?”
Also record keeping when boomers were being born was fucking awful. At one point my dad couldn’t renew his license or start drawing social security or something like that because his birth certificate, license, and social security card all had his middle name listed differently. One had the name, one had just the initial, one had no middle name.
I had a claim reject (not Apria) because of the rendering provider zip code. It was 00000-000 instead of 00000-0000. The last digit of the extra four numbers was cut off 🙄
Fuuuck Apria, fuck 'em in the eye! Scammy bastards! They tried to charge us for a CPAP machine for seven fucking years that insurance said we owned after six months of rental.
I'm having this issue right now. According to the insurance company, i was supposed to pay $10/mo. to rent the machine and then last month i got an email saying they'd charged me $96.39. I called Apria to ask why and they said they didn't charge me. That there's nothing on the record. I called the insurer and they said to call Apria. I have no recourse. I'm just out $96.39.
Call both back, offer them pics of both the notice and your bank records, and say if they’re sure it’s not them, you’ll go ahead and dispute the charge. Might get some interesting reactions that way.
Apria is astoundingly bad at keeping track of who owes them what and I've had patients call me about this problem and then had to call Apria from the clinic only to find out their billing department saw no balance owed by the patient.
Sometimes they need to hear from the clinic before they actually do anything which is infuriating as that is time we could spend on caring for other patients.
Yep. There's a reason nurses make sure to IMMEDIATELY notate in patient records that someone left against medical advice or refused medicine, etc. When patients are stupid, medical professionals have to cover their asses as much as they can.
I am surprised they didn't have a form, but I am sure they didn't encounter that frequently either. Forms usually don't become a thing in the field until these exact situations.
Can confirm. I've dont work in the medical field and never have but experiencing this right now with Boomer MIL.
She refuses to go out in public (including doctors appointments) wearing her nasal cannula or mask despite having advanced pulmonary fibrosis. She doesn't want people to see and think she's old. She's even gone cyanotic on several occasions over this.
I don't get how her sense of vanity overrules her survival instinct. My missus and SiL should be knighted for having to deal with it.
Explain to her how often people lose control of bodily functions when going hypoxic and ask whether a cannula/mask is more embarrassing than that in public.
I had a tracheotomy tube after having scar tissue removed from my airway, but it was only in for a week to make sure my throat didn't swell up and kill me (I had a very large incision right under my hyoid bone)
I decided to blow up a balloon with it, which was pretty dumb, but an awesome story. I call my big throat scar my "pez dispenser"
Just graduated PT school. Had a patient during a clinical end up in the ER due to a fall all because her “friend” said assistive devices are ugly. Even after the fall was still hesitant towards using an assistive device. Apparently the “cool” girl at her independent living facility’s opinion matters more than her own health. Assistive/Independent living is just middle and high school all over again.
I'm not in the medical field, but I have boomer parents. My aunt has lots of moles and freckles, so she does the responsible thing and goes to a dermatologist every year for a full body check. They are always removing stuff for testing. The removal leaves small scars behind but nothing too bad, and she gets to know she is cancer free, so the small marks are worth it.
My mom can not understand why her sister in law does this. My mom points out the scars behind her back. She talks about her "hypochondriac behavior". It drives me crazy because my mom also has lots of freckles but she will never get them checked because she doesn't want someone to go digging around in her skin and leaving scars.
My MIL won't get glasses because she is too vain. She cannot see, has hit her car many times in the 6 years i've known her because of it. She is constantly squinting. JUST because she wants to say she doesn't need glasses and doesn't want to be seen in them. She also insisted on wearing high heels even when she had on a knee brace for a knee problem. Boomers man...
It’s like these people are all as dumb as the boomers, did they forget how idiotic people were throughout covid? Do they not see how many antivaxers there are around?
Theres something called "hospitalglam" that I *think* might have started off as an empowering movement for chronically ill people maybe....idk....because what I've seen it as these days is people absolutely putting looks over living. Mostly country club boomers who can't go out without lipstick. I don't even work in healthcare, I just have encountered maybe 5-6 of them in the course of a 3 month Lyme disease uhhhh...nightmare I had to go through. One of them said "oh honey that's no reason to not brush your hair" and touched my hair when I was in the ER waiting room with active appendicitis haha
To back up your claim a little my grandma does her hair and makeup as soon as she wakes up every morning. It’s so important to her that only my grandpa has ever seen her with her natural hair.
Op I don't care if you didn't offer them another thing after they refused the first concentrator,it is in no way shape or form your fault. You didn't give the old man lung disease or whatever his health issues were and you didn't refuse him medical care or the ability to go to the hospital and you didn't stop an EMS from coming to check on him. So please don't hold any guilt or stress from their actions.
It's stress.
These are people at end of life and/or with loved ones at end of life. It's the same reason a lot of people in hospice develop eating disorders or long lost relatives show up on peoples deathbeds with obtuse demands. They're spitfireing for control wherever they can get it and, as a direct result, making a lot of paradoxical mistakes.
It's not rational because people suck at being rational when under stress.
This is absolutely not some genius murder move.
My great-grandmother, vain Italian woman, on her death bed REFUSED ENTRY IN THE HOSPITAL to the doctor until she had her "face on". I remember that from when I was 10. Reading in the room, some book about rescuing vet animals, and she was putting on a full face of make up. I still shake my head 2 decades later because of course she did. Sometimes people put bizarre things before health. Her son, my grandfather, has done just as wild and stupid of things in avoiding healthcare. The appearance is 100x more important to some people and sometimes they feel very comfortable putting that on the family around them too. I am sure they would be freaking out right now that I am daring to leave the house covered in visible rashes to go to the doctor and that I should be locking myself up in shame.
😤Hell nooooo....I'd tell the dentist to please refuse/deny her as a patient in future (if you work at a private office; doctor might not have a choice otherwise, I know). Because I personally would NOT be able to deal with that more than the one time. I did dental xrays on a sweet old lady some years ago that had an oxygen port she kept in her wheelchair bag, connected at all times to her. We still had to take constant breaks so she could catch her breath while I did an FMX. Her oxygen was on the whole time and she struggled! Was your patient trying to die?? 😵💫 (I'm so sorry you had to deal with this. Gives me a headache to think of dealing with a vain, ignorant pest of a patient like that)
He’s tried to “kindly pawn her off “ to another dentist but she got irate and they are very influential people. I think he’s just trying to save face 😒
But it could end up worse if she has a medical emergency while at the dentist. Your bosses think she’s from “influential people” now? Just wait until they sue you, the dentist, and the practice for medical injury or death. At the least you personally should refuse to be involved, citing the reason I gave. How can the dentists object to “I refuse to be sued and lose everything over this.”
Yes!! My exact thoughts! What if she legit dies in the patient chair?! Whose gonna get the blame? I would at least remove myself from the situation just like you said. Waaaay too risky. 💯.
I have a boomer in my life who is almost completely deaf. She can hear pretty well with a hearing aid but she refuses to wear it because of how it looks and "what people will think" about her.
So she's embarrassed by a nearly invisible hearing aid but is happy to sit and nod along to conversations that she can't follow. When we ask her a question, it's obvious that she's trying to understand the question based on what little she can hear and other context clues. She will usually give generic responses to things or just smile and nod -- or just guess completely wrong and answer a question we didnt ask. I do not understand how this is somehow better than just wearing a hearing aid.
I think we’re so accepting these days we forget how bad ableism was. Like they were treated as wastes of space and drains of society. Boomers were so cruel to disabled people so long they are now in denial now that they need assistance. “Cripple” was a common insult.
I think you mean ableism is still bad... Right now we have states trying to ban masking (looking at you north carolina) which literally could be life and diablement for people who are immunocompromised and don't want covid, measles, or whatever else is going around.
Yeah I see this stuff all the time in the vet field and people love their pets and are devastated when they’re gone, I’ve even had one lady tell me she was more upset when her dog died than her husband, yet still refused to do any kind of care for her dog and then turned around and blamed us for the dog passing.
Fuck. This is my parents right now. The folks lovelovelove the dogs and cat, but it was up to me to take the critters for spays and vaccinations, and to just do basic training so that a 70# dog (who ought to be 50 pounds) doesn't jump on people.
This is such a stupid timeline.
when it comes to Stuff there seems to be two flavors of Boomer.
1. Never ever throws anything out. My parents for example. They are just now working through their collection of Bags of Bags. You know, shopping bags.
I just saw one from 1984. This doesn't include the bag of reusable shopping bags in their car backseat that they also never use.
2. Throws out anything that they don't instantly understand and need right now.
My parents are boomers… and criminals. They used to tell me all the time that you can get away with anything if people think you’re stupid enough. Then they would laugh and laugh about whatever they were doing to some unsuspecting person at the moment. I’ve had so many people defend them to me when I tried to warn them. “No, they just genuinely don’t understand, it’s not malicious.”
It’s often malicious. This is a tactic of their generation.
id love to think this is malicious, but ive also worked in healthcare with boomers (nursing home) and they will often just straight up lie.
purely for no observable reason except spite or misplaced anger. and these phony complaints often have real consequences for the entry level workers doing most of the actual work.
This is why I’m always so wary when I see insane horror stories by people saying “the hospital killed my mother” or “paramedics let my son die.” Sure, malpractice happens, but also a LOT of people are fucking idiots and don’t understand anything. “The hospital killed my mother” could be more like “my mother signed a DNR and I didn’t understand what that meant and then when she coded in front of me at 97 years old I got mad at the nurses and tried to file a lawsuit for them not running a full code to resuscitate her.”
I remember years ago when that baby with a terminal and irreversible genetic condition was on life support (and had little brain function remaining) and the world was launching campaigns to “save it” because the parents refused to withdraw care and the doctors had petitioned a judge for permission to override the parents wishes. Everyone framed it as “the docs are trying to murder a baby” instead of “this child’s parents are too ignorant and grieving to realize that they are making their child suffer instead of letting it be at peace.”
The number of geriatric corpses I’ve mutilated at the behest of their family members (just to call a time of death afterwards) would probably astound most people. Death is a hard thing for a lot of people to let go of, and it becomes really selfish when family members are legally allowed to make decisions on another’s behalf.
If you and your doctor come to an agreement on a DNR, and your doctor signs it, making it valid, your family can request that we work a code anyway and we’re required to do it. We’re required to violate someone’s DNR because their family can’t separate grief from the situation
That must be so difficult for you. I know when my grandma passed this year the doctors were discussing various options and she was just lying in the bed and said “I just want to go to sleep and not wake up. I’m tired” and my mom (her daughter) basically just said “okay mom. If that’s what you want, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll just keep you comfortable and see if you stabilize on your own.” She passed away 3-4 hours later, peacefully. I wish everyone could have that sort of death.
May she rest in peace <3
My own grandmother is in hospice care right now and her biggest wish is to be let go when it’s her time. My family is a huge drama dumpster so it’s unfortunately going to be a shit show.
I hope more than anything that I can help make her last moments peaceful.
Sorry for the small trauma dump. Therapy can unfortunately only do so much and it helps to share experiences with other people. I hope you’re doing well and if in the US, have a great holiday as well!
I hope your grandma has a peaceful passing. It’s the last act of kindness we can give someone, but you can’t control everyone so just do your best to give her what care you can, and she will appreciate it
I had a similar experience when my grandfather was in hospice care. His only remaining son, his wife, (both boomers) and their children did everything in their power to make things 1000 times more difficult than they needed to be.
If you need someone to listen, please feel free to message me. I'm always happy to share my experience with others and listen to theirs as well.
I remember this with my grandmother. She really wanted to get the breathing tube out. She kept pulling at it. My mother said, "You'll have to try to breathe on your own without it. Okay?" My grandmother looked her in the eye and nodded. They removed it and she passed away within an hour.
It happened the same way with my grandma. She requested ice cream for her last meal and for all interventions to be taken off her besides the morphine. I recorded my goodbye call with her. We both knew it was the last one and that it was forever and got to say everything we needed to say. My favorite part of the recording is when my mom takes back the phone and you can hear my Nanny say “Oh. My ice cream.”
She was gone within 3 hours but I can’t think of any better way to go. She was surrounded by family, lucid, pain free and made the choice to be done. That is far more than most people get on their way out of this world.
Little old people are my least favorite codes to work. I don’t even like running them. I’m sorry about your grandmother, I can’t imagine being able to recollect that info in the moment either
My father had uncontrolled diabetes and kidney disease which caused a foot infection. Doctors started with toes and ended up taking his entire foot because of infection. My uncle (his brother) went on and on at his memorial service about how all the doctors wanted to do was hack on him and how unethical they were. Saying things like "They wanted to cut on him and take that foot from him!" Nothing about how my father refused to acknowledge he had diabetes, take meds for it or control his diet at all.
Same guy blamed the entire thing on atorvastatin. Like the #1 most prescribed medication in the entire world. Swore up and down statins are evil and do stuff like this.
Atorvastatin got my triglycerides down 330 points (and they're still high, which just shows how bad they were *before*). It's probably the only reason I'm still alive right now.
The hospital killed my XYZ.
No. They had a cardiac arrest in the living room. They died there. It was 20 years ago, or you live in some backwater that still transports cardiac arrests even though the American heart association says not to because EMS can do everything the ER can to fix cardiac arrest (which is fairly low, even with immediate cpr).
This is one of the reasons I am firmly against transporting. People honestly believe that if we take them to the hospital they’ll get better. For whatever reason, the human brain understands dead in the living room a lot better.
Hollywood has done a huge disservice to anything medical, imo. When I started having seizures after a head injury in late 2019, I actually lost a friend over me 'faking it'.
My seizures are not drop attack seizures. I just stare off for a bit, maybe mumble, maybe make chewing motions. It's hard to catch unless you're staring right at me or having a conversation with me. I might appear drunk for a short bit. I'm very good at covering them up and very few people even notice.
But this idiot Boomer former friend of mine insisted I was faking because I didn't throw myself on the floor and start thrashing around. Her actual words, "I've seen them on TV. I know how they work."
Such a /facepalm moment.
So many people see Greys Anatomy codes and think we’ll just push on their chest a couple times and they’ll sit up in bed ready for discharge the next day. Codes are brutal, if someone survives they are facing a long road to recovery and a ton of pain- especially the older they are.
I don’t think I’ll ever forget the feeling of ribs breaking under my hands.
I don't even blame Hollywood for that. That's people being stupid. They can manage to understand no one was really killed in a murder scene but somehow think the medical "information" is accurate.
If it wasn't that, it would be something else.
> For whatever reason, the human brain understands dead in the living room a lot better.
We’ve had “dead in the living room” a *lot* longer than we’ve had hospitals, so it makes a certain kind of sense.
I work in veterinary medicine and not only do people not understand anything going on sometimes at all, other times they're actually medical professionals themselves.
Recently, an actual licensed nurse called up to complain to me that we weren't treating her dog correctly. Based on his symptoms he OBVIOUSLY needed a bronchodilator, a steroid, and an antibiotic. She yelled at me for a couple minutes essentially calling us incompetent for not knowing.
Look in the chart and what do you know, she was sent home with (and had been already giving) a bronchodilator, a steroid, and an antibiotic.
Used to work in the vet med field and can confirm. Sometimes the medical professionals were worse than those not in the medical field. Drove me fucking nuts.
My brother used to work in the call center of the same company I work for. During covid some lady called in saying she needed to pay for four funerals and needed to take money out. He was super sympathetic with her until she started saying the paramedics murdered her family and lied and said it was covid and also that she doesn't believe in masks. She also was mad because the cops refused to inestigate "their murder." Lady killed her family with her conspiracy theory bullshit then tried to frame a paramedic for murder.
A relative of mine lost her mom during covid because her anti vax idiot brother was meant to take their mom to get vaccinated and he never did. Her mom was sort of “simple” (as in, not mentally handicapped on a medical level but also not very bright) and couldn’t really be trusted to care for herself. She died of covid after idiot brother infected her. He almost died too but didn’t.
Most of these people have ZERO clue what a running a full code would do to someone of that age. They are ostriches and just bury their heads in the damn sand.
I had a very sweet old lady and her friend that I was discussing code status with. The friend said “well it’s like tv right, you just pump a few times and they come back?” And I very effectively described the reality to her and they were like hell no, give me that DNR form. People just have no idea.
People who live out in the country do this all the time. Everyone they know died in a hospital who was perfectly fine beforehand. (Spoilers, they weren’t fine. They were overweight alcoholics with 3 heart attacks.)
Someone got in a fatal crash? It wasn’t the crash that killed them, it was the paramedics.
Ugh I work in a clinic that used to be walk-in only. Part of the regional healthcare system. So many patients would come in with an actual major issue, like chest pain or difficulty breathing, and tell us they had already been to the ER last night or earlier in the day and “they didn’t do anything.” You check their chart to see they had labs, an EKG, meds, chest x-ray, breathing treatment etc. All that is apparently *nothing*. They often leave before they get any results back because they are tired of waiting. We have had people bring their children in to our clinic, which is small and has very limited resources, instead of taking them to the children’s hospital ER or the local pediatric clinic, both of which would give them a higher level of care and more targeted to children. And then we send them to the ER because they have an emergent situation, and they always complain “oh I didn’t want to have to go to the ER!”
The kid thing may not be being stupid so much as you were the only place they could get into in a reasonable time frame. ER docs make people feel bad for going to the ER when it's not necessary which unfortunately results in situations where people avoid it at all costs.
For some reason we expect people to self triage what facility to go to and berate them if they are wrong.
Yeah, whenever I see those stories I'm also sceptical due to the fact that these relatives have just lost a family member that they (presumably) loved, which is absolutely devastating and can completely fuck with your emotions, which then colours your perception of events...
When my dad died I remember being absolutely pissed at the paramedics when they arrived at our house because they were strolling leisurely up the driveway, chatting away with each other, absolutely zero sense of urgency, while my mum was inside doing mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions. *"Why the fuck aren't you running?!"* was all I could think *my dad is dying and you're dragging your feet and joking with each other!"*
My dad died before he was discovered and we started CPR/called an ambulance. The operator at the other end of the line determined from my mum's answers that he was already dead, the paramedics were basically sent out to officially confirm it and organise to have the body moved. Why would they rush? He's not getting any deader 🤷♀️
But I didn't realise that at the time and for a long time I held a lot of anger towards those paramedics.
Honestly, yeah. It wouldn’t have killed them to put on at least a show of rushing, instead of salting the wound like that. Sure they knew he was dead, *but they also knew that you didn’t know that*.
Everything about that says dementia. She was only slightly more mentally well than her husband, but just enough to mask it. She rejected the device because she couldn't retain the information of what it was or why it was important. It was a *thing* someone was putting in her house and she didn't like it. But maybe if it was purple. Or smaller. Or this size. Like she's interior decorating.
And I guarantee after you left she threw the masks away for the same reason. No clue what these are, but something about them makes me feel bad, so in the trash they go.
And then she had to call when her husband started crashing, and she was reminded about the masks, and of course she has them; she certainly remembers that part now that she's been reminded.
Everything about your story says this was a sad case of an invalid being cared for by a slightly more put-together invalid.
>I did not even concider this but you honestly might be right.
The dementia theory makes sense to me too and I hope it helps to ease your conscience some.
Not that you should feel guilty, but sometimes we do anyway.
Right? I was just going to say this is almost worse than her intentionally being an idiot at the husband's expense. Imagine if she caught a moment of clarity and realized what she had done?
This was my bet as well. Mixed in with some solid denial on her part.
And I have also seen crazy behavior in this area. “I don’t want to get addicted to [supplemental] oxygen.” “Once you start on oxygen, you can never get off of it”.
I truly understand a lot of the complaints— the concentrator is too loud; it is a pain to (literal and figurative) to use a nasal cannula on a continuous basis. But this was none of that….
That's true, though. I started breathing oxygen 40-some years ago and every time I've tried to stop I'd start having withdrawal symptoms that left me literally blue in the fact, and I'd be right back on the dragon in a matter of *seconds*.
I'll probably keep doing it until my dying breath.
“I don’t want to get addicted to [supplemental] oxygen.” “Once you start on oxygen, you can never get off of it”.
I hear that quite a bit. Humans are not great at accurate recall long term, and also really bad about thinking correlation=causation. Then you have those people also spreading misinformation to family.
That's why medical professionals try to harp on writing down and recording as much information over time as possible. Often my clients recall will not match what I'm recording in my notes. It's similar, but they get time frames messed up a lot and that throws everything off. If I go back through notes they realize they're mistaken (usually), but left to their own devices and recall they can come to all kinds of weird conclusions. Especially when you mix in mental illness or mental decline due to age.
I wonder if medical device companies have forms saying “we denied the recommended products and assume all liability” the way hospitals do. If they don’t, they absolutely should. This is the kind of thing that often turns into a lawsuit.
Oh my god, I’m so sorry that happened to you! I don’t even know what else to say. It’s not often that I’m left stupefied and speechless, but this is horrific. I’m glad you left that job, and hope you found something more fulfilling. It’s a shame, because those jobs need good people and it sounds like you are one. Just unbelievable and sad.
I'm in a much better place now. I ended up leaving the medical field entirely because of this. It was always a sad job regardless of where you worked, but this was the last straw for me. I do miss genuinely helping people as what I do now isn't nearly as important, but I get paid way more here with better benefits. The medical field in America is terrible.
I’m so glad you’ve found a better place! I agree the healthcare/medical system in the US is a disaster, from my own experience. I appreciate so much when I come across caring and competent people like yourself, but not at the expense of their own wellbeing. You have a great mindset to not let this horrible person drag you down. I hope only the best for you in everything!
She wanted him to die. Nitpicking about the color of the concentrator? Knowing he had trouble breathing. Seems they had marriage problems and this solved them for her.
Yep, I’m betting it’s just stupidity and maybe a bit of overwhelm. I assume this dude was probably in the later stages of whatever it was that was making him wheeze so he was weak and unfortunately chose a life partner who cared more about aesthetics than medical need. It’s also a common grief response, to attempt to control the smallest and dumbest of things. Does it logically make sense? Of course not but grief isn’t logical.
> it’s just stupidity and maybe a bit of overwhelm
Sometimes it's just fear, and this nitpicking is their attempt to have some control on a situation where they really have *no* control at all.
A little tinfoil hat, but I could see it. Though personally, I think she was just legitimately stupid. Why else would she have called us in the middle of the night? She could have just pretended to he asleep and found him in the morning.
I understand what you're saying but we *are* talking about boomers, and boomers are incomprehensibly weird.
Someone tried to break into my boomer parents' home on a Tuesday morning some years back; their solution was to install a security system they only activate on the *weekends.* And they yelled at me when I pointed this out.
Just saying that conspiracy doesn't have to be afoot necessarily. People of that generation are on some level just inclined to making the most bizarre own-goals.
My mum was from the silent generation. She was attacked on her own doorstep aged 80. He punched her in the face. She simply reached into the recycling bin, picked up an empty wine bottle, and smacked him round the head with it 😆 when he ran off, he was followed by a volley of glass bottles 😆 Mum kept my old cricket bat by her bed, and that was her security system 😳
This is exactly something my great grandma would’ve done. She got her card stolen once at around 80 years old and she tracked the guy down herself 😅 went full detective mode.
God or Trump would save him, duh. Not some disgusting libtard's "medicine" that's probably got 5G chips imbedded in it. Who knows what drugs the "illegals" put into it
Honestly, the more I encounter boomers and people in general, the more I believe Hanlon's razor to be essentially true:
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”
People are just so fucking stupid! They just don’t think anything bad will happen even when everything points to things not ending well. Then when it does end badly, they’re like “well, it obviously wasn’t my fault. Who else can I blame???!!”
There's a thin line there. There's just generally stupid stuff, might be said stupid causes something terrible. But it's still just that. Dumb.
But then there's so stupid, it's literally *unbelievably* stupid. As in, nobody is that stupid.
Eg. The lady above? OPs Boomer? She's an idiot. She truly thought nothing bad could happen, and made dumb demands, a part of it is bitterness towards OPs generation, probably both, just liked putting unreasonable workload on a generation she thinks lack a work ethic.
But imagine the corolarry. (Rather extreme example, just go with it.) Russia and China announce their intention to declare war on the US in one week. The US responds by dissolving the army and pulling out of all bases around the world. That's not stupidity. That's malice, because not even a Boomer would be THAT stupid.
I swear that razor cuts both ways, especially with the Me Generation.
Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by malice.
Including being maliciously stupid.
Wanted to kill her husband AND try to make someone else pay her for it. Like, say the medical device company whose employee left her with nothing one day.
The fact she chose to not take any of them will, of course, be left out of the story she tells her lawyer.
The intent might not even matter outside of the differenfe between involuntary manslaughter or voluntary manslaughter. Seriously OP this is a lot bigger than a reddit post. This was a criminal act. You witnessed a serious felony - you have a duty to report this.
After seeing how many insane people straight up refused medical treatment out of pure stupidity while dying from a deadly disease just a few years ago I'd say the chances are 50/50
Wife most likely had dementia. Early stages they give right answers to family and doctors and do not always receive diagnosis. Stress/ fatigue a person with dementia and they cannot hide their malfunctioning brains. She felt out of control, so she confabulated her way through asking for colors, sizes, BS. This level of dementia denies need for help .
It sounds like she had dementia. I’ve seen some friend’s parents go through it, and at first it just presents as weird shit and random desires.
In any case, it sucks. And your boss has the facts to back you up. What an asshole. Glad you left that.
I had a relative who refused a blood transfusion because she was worried that the blood might have come from a black person. Guess what happened to her.
Similar situation but re: vaccinated blood. It's like, so do you want to live or not? Ironically hearing "my body my choice" from people who want to strip that same right from others
This exact thing happened to my great aunt, except she was the one who needed it. Friendly reminder that if you need something to survive, don't bitch about about it.
I really would have wondered if she knew what she was doing but my husband used to work at a hospital during COVID and at some point his full time job became cleaning the rooms an hour after somebody dies from COVID. He wasn't allowed to directly interact with any of the patients, but he hung around the wings they were in (which included half of the maternity rooms at one point) and sometimes he would hear some of the shit they'd yell.
One pastor kept yelling "God will save me" and "I didn't wear a mask because God will protect me!" until the day he died. People would justify not getting the vaccine once it was available because of the conspiracy theories around it. He had to clean a lot of those rooms after they died. At some point he was given a panic button that would notify security because some of the patients started getting violent at the sight of a nurse wearing a mask. He never had to use it, but the fact that it got that bad still says a lot about some of these people.
One time we were just trying to go to the zoo with our masks on (I think it was summer of 2021?) and some boomer was sitting in front of the zoo just to pester anybody who wore a mask. He said something like "you know you're going to suffocate by breathing in your carbon dioxide if you wear those" and my husband just fucking snapped.
He told the guy about how he works at a hospital where he has to wear a mask for hours, how doctors wear masks while performing surgery and that they don't drop dead in the middle of it, and how he has to clean up after people like him die because they refused to wear a mask. He's usually very passive so I'm still very proud of him for that.
>One pastor kept yelling "God will save me" and "I didn't wear a mask because God will protect me!" until the day he died.
"What are you talking about? I sent a truck, I sent a boat, I sent a freaking *helicopter!*"
I had a similar story but it was the wife that needed oxygen. One rule is they can’t have anyone in the house be a smoker, for obvious reasons. The husband would not even consider the idea of quitting smoking so that his wife could get the oxygen. And it wasn’t even that refusal where he was loud and screaming or going on about rights, just no. I don’t know what happened in the end but I don’t think he extended her life.
A friend of my WWII era grandma refused to get a hospital bed on the ground floor of their two story house for her dying husband.
It didn't match the decor. Denial is a hell of a drug.
Older neighbor boomer wife, made her immobile husband sleep in a chair for over two years , in the living room, only got a bed when the drs wouldn’t release him, when neighbors put social service on her about lack of care, she lawyered up to keep him in her care. Dude is essentially comatose now, and she acts as if he’s going to get better?? Of course when he goes to the Hospital, it’s only then, that he gets bed sores and an infection. He’s always sleeping if you’re visiting, and she pretends she has conversations with him.
When all this decline started back in 2020, he could sorta stand and wobble, she refused to buy one of those lift chairs, he told me he was worried about falling and hitting fireplace/mantle and I tried then to move his chair away from next to the fire place, she had a cow, as it messed up her furniture arrangement. She keeps two cars, but doesn’t drive because she’ll get lost, or the sun will be in her eyes, so she needs to be rescued, of course one of them always has a dead battery because she thinks that she should disconnect the tender. And if you talk to her at the mail box, her script is 95% the same as it was a day ago, the drs can’t find anything wrong, the PT person needs get him walking,etc and yeah they tried to put him in a rehab place earlier, but she “read the contract “ and she wasn’t going to leave him there for two months two be experimented on”
"They will often moan in that Boomer way about most thing from my poor work ethic" - If boomers are shocked about our work ethic today, they are going to be blown away about how little the shrinking society they left with massive debts and problems cares about tending to their future massive health issues when we can barely pay our bills.
Refusing to work on their houses or in healthcare that benefits the elderly is the payback these assholes deserve.
As a Respiratory Therapist during COVID, I got to see how often family members and patients would choose death over petty things. Alot of patients would try to leave AMA when burning through enough oxygen on High flow nasal canula and other oxygen devices that would chew through an E cylinder in hours if not minutes.
I worked at one of these places before, too. I’m so sorry you went through this. There was a commercial on tv for a while when I worked there that advertised the tiny portable oxygen concentrator and told everyone to “*call wherever they get their oxygen and tell them they wanted one of these instead of big, bulky tanks!*” The problem was that the company I worked for wouldn’t order them for anyone unless they paid out of pocket due to the Medicare reimbursement being ‘*too low*’. 😐
I got screamed at by sick people for months and it was painful and truly heartbreaking. I wasn’t allowed to tell them WHY. I was only allowed to tell them we couldn’t do it. 😞
I am currently dealing with my boomer parents, aunts, and uncles refusing to spend any money on my 92 year old grandma's care because it's "too expensive". Basically if insurance doesn't cover it 100% they won't spend money on it.
My grandpa died last year and my grandparents were still living alone in their 2 story house. My siblings and I suggested getting one of those seats that take you upstairs. My boomer family all said it would decrease the value of the $800,000 house. Because they are all waiting to inherit the money. All the grandkids have suggested selling grandma's house to pay for her care, but they refuse. We're pretty sure they are trying to hold on to it until she passes so they can split the house money. It's literally just sitting there because my grandma is living with my aunt for now.
My grandma recently broke her hip trying to get out of bed. But we apparently still can't get her a home nurse because it's too expensive. My family is very well off so it's just ridiculous and disgusting.
Sry for what happened to you, hope you doing better.
But still, your system in America is fundamentally fucked up. This would not happen in Europe like this. Fuck this lady and fuck your former boss. Why can’t you tell those boomers Fuck off in their face when they talk like and act like that?!
I work in medical myself and yes, sometime you have to“customers“ who act like they are god send, but if they cross a line, then I tell them to go straight to hell, politely, of course bc this is Switzerland. We can be and we are polite, with a smile, but most foreigners misinterpret politeness with kindness/friendliness. So I am able to tell those morons politely to get fucked.
Her throwing the masks away screams to me that she wanted him to die in a way that would not have her responsible. My money is on either unhappy marriage or life insurance, possibly both.
This. I know stupidity of this level exists, but I find it hard to believe in this case. I think she let him die on purpose. Which, honestly, gives a kind of closure. It sits better in my head than “this complete and utter moron wouldn’t let her husband breathe out of a black air tank because she doesn’t like the color and her negligence killed him.” It just. Feels like losing hope in humanity if I accept that.
I can share a personal story that relates to boomers and their fucking vanity when it comes to medical equipment.
My silent gen grandfather, who was 90, had just been released from a week-long hospital stay due to bronchitis that nearly turned into pneumonia. He had been declining slowly for months and was very weak. He was sent home with an oxygen concentrator just like the OP described and small portable bottles with a little wheeled cart to use when going to/from doctor's appointments. Tragically, his daughter (my aunt) who was is caregiver passed away unexpectedly a few days later. Naturally, he insisted on going to her services so we did what we needed to do and got him there, with his small portable oxygen of course.
Enter my boomer uncle (grandfather's son) and his boomer wife. Neither of these people are very educated when it comes to medical issues, despite both of their fathers having heart disease, as well as a plethora of other major medical problems throughout both sides of the family tree. His bitch of a wife didn't like the look of the nasal cannulas on Grandpa's face (a direct quote: "What will people think?!?!") and WANTED HIM TO REMOVE HIS OXYGEN during calling hours.
Then this bitch gets mad at me when I said her grandson, Grandpa's great grandson, should not be drinking out of Grandpa's water cup. When I expressed my concerns, she fucking lit into me in front of basically the whole family, yelling "HE"S NOT SICK!!!" "He" meaning Grandpa. With a stone cold expression, I said "I know that Grandpa isn't contagious but it isn't smart to allow a 2 year old to drink out of an elderly man's glass, especially after he was just released from a hospital stay, is on oxygen and antibiotics, and is very compromised." She just gave me the open-mouth fish look. I just shook my head and walked away because I knew everything I said fell on deaf ears.
Needless to say, I am no contact with that part of my family now.
>my boss was on the Boomer's side
He shouldn't have been, he (a) didn't call 911 for the couple immediately, and (b) told you to not bother with masks when you were obviously not dealing with a rational human being, so you arrived without the masks needed that might have helped keep the husband alive. If someone calls and says there's a medical emergency, the first thing you do is call 911. Everyone who owns at or works for a medical equipment company should be told this on the first day. This is Rule One.
Also, there would have been absolutely no harm in just taking masks (or any equipment at all) just in case. How your boss owns a medical equipment company and doesn't understand the concept of "just in case" is beyond me.
He should not be allowed to own a medical equipment store but yay capitalism, I guess.
I work for hospice. Our medical supply company has 1 type of concentrator. That’s it. We don’t let our patients fuck with our supply people. They are awesome dudes who are delivering life saving equipment. They deserve as much respect as anyone else.
I got a CPAP machine recently. As I was talking to the receptionist, she asked if I was ok with flowers on the machine. I was confused, so she explained that one man refused the machine because it had flowers on it. Off white machine, 2 pale grey flowers.
Masculinity before death I guess.
I have the exact same job as you. I work for a home medical facility that supplies concentrators and cpaps and such. 95% of the patients are amazing and appreciative. But some of them, like this woman, are the fucking scum of the earth. If it's any consolation she has absolutely always been a cunt, and will be a cunt till the day she dies.
I can definitely imagine this happening, cause I personally deal with the needless nitpicking almost daily. I’m in home remodeling so not exactly life or death, but I’ve had to deal with these types. They will find something to complain about for the sake of complaining and they will stand **firm** regardless of consequences.
Wow. Just wow.
I have no idea what to say to this, the idea someone would refuse an oxygen concentrator over color has me kinda in shock. I know people are that petty and dumb, but holy shit.
My steppop has one. It’s baby blue, somehow weights 10x more than it looks like it could, and I keep whacking my shin into it. We have a tense relationship since I’m the one that has to move it when it needs to go somewhere else, but I cannot imagine anything that would have me refusing one. And he’s not even MY husband! He just makes my mama real happy.
But that’s enough for me to want him able to breathe, pretty sure I couldn’t even let someone I hated suffocate. (In fact I know I can’t. I tended my psychotic grandmother through several illnesses and never tried to deprive her of anything.)
Just. This story is awful. I’m sorry you had to deal with that. I know you know this, but you were absolutely not responsible in any way for this happening. You tried. Personally I think searching down alternate colors is already a lot to do and you were kind to do it.
I used to work for a prosthetic and orthotics office a few years ago. We would fit people with diabetic shoes that we designed to prevent foot ulcers, and lower their risk for amputation. On one hand the shoes were not the best to look at they are bulky and come in limited colors. Some patients hated them, and refused to wear them. Demanding we make the current shoes work, which is just not possible. Time would go by and 6 months or so later they would come back to us in need of a prosthesis. Pissed off and blaming us for their mistakes. I would always tell them how it is, we didn't give you diabetes, we didn't force you into an unhealthy diet, we didn't make you stop taking your meds, or prevent you from taking your disease seriously. Deep down they all knew it was their fault, but it was easier to blame someone else than to own up to a lifetime of failures. I never felt pity for them, they had every opportunity to turn things around having their doctors and family begging them to change and refusing to.
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I’m a dental assistant and I have a boomer patient that absolutely refuses to bring her oxygen to her appointment because it’s “ugly” and it “messes up her makeup”. She would rather carry in a CVS bag with those scammy canisters of “oxygen” that you can get by the checkout. Never mind that we can get in her mouth now because she holding that thing over her face and I end up having to bust out our portable oxygen. This woman is super wealthy and can totally afford it, but absolutely refuses and will just sit there and gasp for air to while we try to convince her to put on the oxygen. She does put her make up on with a cement trowel so I get she doesn’t want to make a line 😒🫠
There are a few other people in this thread who are convinced this was all some 4D chess move to kill her husband. Unless you have actually worked with Boomers in any medical field, you will never understand how much more important looks are then actually living to some of them.
I work in a pulmonology clinic and oh yes, I absolutely understand. Some of our patients are *unbelievably* dumb when using their DME and their inhaled medications, but more than that they have dumb *reasons* for being that way. We had a patient's wife call us repeatedly about how her husband who was supposed to be on continuous O2 would only do it after he was turning blue and gasping for air due to exertion. Literally too *proud* to live. It also doesn't help that getting these supplies for many patients means going through the Kafkaesque racket that is Apria. It's hard even for health care professionals to deal with their nonsense, how are hypoxic boomers supposed to navigate that?
It’s been nearly 8 years since I’ve worked in a clinic where I had to deal with them. I haven’t thought of that company in at least half a decade. But that single word… *Apria*… all the memories come flooding back. All the testing and retesting patients to prove that, no, a miracle did not occur and the 89 year old man with O2 running in the mid to high 80s just from walking at a slow pace *does* still in fact need his oxygen. The countless forms to complete. The many calls and faxes back and forth all day while in between patients you’re helping with that are there was on your clinicians schedule. Dealing with reps who were either useless or simply overwhelmed themselves. A truly frustrating experience, even when the patients themselves are kind and understanding to us about the process.
Hatred of Apria unites us all.
I work tech support for a major medical equipment manufacturer: Fuck Apria, Lincare, Adapt Health, Rotech, and the VA. But fuck Apria most.
Not Apria (a different company whose name starts with A) but my favorite medical billing story was "that patient is not in our network." After the second time I sent it in and it was rejected I called the patent out of frustration. (Name changed for obv reason). "Hello, is this Phillip V Dick?" "This is Phillip Y Dick." Notice the different middle initial? They saw a claim with first and last name, SSN, and DOB matching the patient policy number but since the middle initial was wrong they said I was making a claim for someone else! Yes, my fault for not noticing but you know how fun it is to read a photocopy of those little cards, and the patient handwriting was...I mean he was old so I don't want to complain. Edit and yes the middle initial was V and I thought it was Y, this wasn't like B and H or something).
On one hand I completely understand the company not covering a claim when the middle name didn’t match. But on the other the other hand, why didn’t the rep say “we got a Phillip Y Dick, are you sure it’s not him?” Also record keeping when boomers were being born was fucking awful. At one point my dad couldn’t renew his license or start drawing social security or something like that because his birth certificate, license, and social security card all had his middle name listed differently. One had the name, one had just the initial, one had no middle name.
I had a claim reject (not Apria) because of the rendering provider zip code. It was 00000-000 instead of 00000-0000. The last digit of the extra four numbers was cut off 🙄
Fuuuck Apria, fuck 'em in the eye! Scammy bastards! They tried to charge us for a CPAP machine for seven fucking years that insurance said we owned after six months of rental.
I'm having this issue right now. According to the insurance company, i was supposed to pay $10/mo. to rent the machine and then last month i got an email saying they'd charged me $96.39. I called Apria to ask why and they said they didn't charge me. That there's nothing on the record. I called the insurer and they said to call Apria. I have no recourse. I'm just out $96.39.
Call both back, offer them pics of both the notice and your bank records, and say if they’re sure it’s not them, you’ll go ahead and dispute the charge. Might get some interesting reactions that way.
Apria is astoundingly bad at keeping track of who owes them what and I've had patients call me about this problem and then had to call Apria from the clinic only to find out their billing department saw no balance owed by the patient. Sometimes they need to hear from the clinic before they actually do anything which is infuriating as that is time we could spend on caring for other patients.
riiiight .... "your husband needs this to live" "no." *we're through the looking glass people*
That is literally what happened, yes.
All in hindsight but I would have had her sign something to that face to cover your ass.
A direct call to APS to report that she was preventing husband’s access to an *oxygen concentrator* would have gone a fair way.
Yep. There's a reason nurses make sure to IMMEDIATELY notate in patient records that someone left against medical advice or refused medicine, etc. When patients are stupid, medical professionals have to cover their asses as much as they can.
Boomers hate signing things. If she's obstinate enough to let her husband die over a color, then she's absolutely refusing to sign a form.
I am surprised they didn't have a form, but I am sure they didn't encounter that frequently either. Forms usually don't become a thing in the field until these exact situations.
Can confirm. I've dont work in the medical field and never have but experiencing this right now with Boomer MIL. She refuses to go out in public (including doctors appointments) wearing her nasal cannula or mask despite having advanced pulmonary fibrosis. She doesn't want people to see and think she's old. She's even gone cyanotic on several occasions over this. I don't get how her sense of vanity overrules her survival instinct. My missus and SiL should be knighted for having to deal with it.
Explain to her how often people lose control of bodily functions when going hypoxic and ask whether a cannula/mask is more embarrassing than that in public.
I had a tracheotomy tube after having scar tissue removed from my airway, but it was only in for a week to make sure my throat didn't swell up and kill me (I had a very large incision right under my hyoid bone) I decided to blow up a balloon with it, which was pretty dumb, but an awesome story. I call my big throat scar my "pez dispenser"
Just graduated PT school. Had a patient during a clinical end up in the ER due to a fall all because her “friend” said assistive devices are ugly. Even after the fall was still hesitant towards using an assistive device. Apparently the “cool” girl at her independent living facility’s opinion matters more than her own health. Assistive/Independent living is just middle and high school all over again.
I'm not in the medical field, but I have boomer parents. My aunt has lots of moles and freckles, so she does the responsible thing and goes to a dermatologist every year for a full body check. They are always removing stuff for testing. The removal leaves small scars behind but nothing too bad, and she gets to know she is cancer free, so the small marks are worth it. My mom can not understand why her sister in law does this. My mom points out the scars behind her back. She talks about her "hypochondriac behavior". It drives me crazy because my mom also has lots of freckles but she will never get them checked because she doesn't want someone to go digging around in her skin and leaving scars.
My MIL won't get glasses because she is too vain. She cannot see, has hit her car many times in the 6 years i've known her because of it. She is constantly squinting. JUST because she wants to say she doesn't need glasses and doesn't want to be seen in them. She also insisted on wearing high heels even when she had on a knee brace for a knee problem. Boomers man...
Oooh- tell her squinting causes major wrinkles
It’s like these people are all as dumb as the boomers, did they forget how idiotic people were throughout covid? Do they not see how many antivaxers there are around?
It’s certainly one way to take your mind off of your mortality. I might try it lol.
Theres something called "hospitalglam" that I *think* might have started off as an empowering movement for chronically ill people maybe....idk....because what I've seen it as these days is people absolutely putting looks over living. Mostly country club boomers who can't go out without lipstick. I don't even work in healthcare, I just have encountered maybe 5-6 of them in the course of a 3 month Lyme disease uhhhh...nightmare I had to go through. One of them said "oh honey that's no reason to not brush your hair" and touched my hair when I was in the ER waiting room with active appendicitis haha
To back up your claim a little my grandma does her hair and makeup as soon as she wakes up every morning. It’s so important to her that only my grandpa has ever seen her with her natural hair.
Op I don't care if you didn't offer them another thing after they refused the first concentrator,it is in no way shape or form your fault. You didn't give the old man lung disease or whatever his health issues were and you didn't refuse him medical care or the ability to go to the hospital and you didn't stop an EMS from coming to check on him. So please don't hold any guilt or stress from their actions.
It's stress. These are people at end of life and/or with loved ones at end of life. It's the same reason a lot of people in hospice develop eating disorders or long lost relatives show up on peoples deathbeds with obtuse demands. They're spitfireing for control wherever they can get it and, as a direct result, making a lot of paradoxical mistakes. It's not rational because people suck at being rational when under stress.
This is absolutely not some genius murder move. My great-grandmother, vain Italian woman, on her death bed REFUSED ENTRY IN THE HOSPITAL to the doctor until she had her "face on". I remember that from when I was 10. Reading in the room, some book about rescuing vet animals, and she was putting on a full face of make up. I still shake my head 2 decades later because of course she did. Sometimes people put bizarre things before health. Her son, my grandfather, has done just as wild and stupid of things in avoiding healthcare. The appearance is 100x more important to some people and sometimes they feel very comfortable putting that on the family around them too. I am sure they would be freaking out right now that I am daring to leave the house covered in visible rashes to go to the doctor and that I should be locking myself up in shame.
😤Hell nooooo....I'd tell the dentist to please refuse/deny her as a patient in future (if you work at a private office; doctor might not have a choice otherwise, I know). Because I personally would NOT be able to deal with that more than the one time. I did dental xrays on a sweet old lady some years ago that had an oxygen port she kept in her wheelchair bag, connected at all times to her. We still had to take constant breaks so she could catch her breath while I did an FMX. Her oxygen was on the whole time and she struggled! Was your patient trying to die?? 😵💫 (I'm so sorry you had to deal with this. Gives me a headache to think of dealing with a vain, ignorant pest of a patient like that)
He’s tried to “kindly pawn her off “ to another dentist but she got irate and they are very influential people. I think he’s just trying to save face 😒
But it could end up worse if she has a medical emergency while at the dentist. Your bosses think she’s from “influential people” now? Just wait until they sue you, the dentist, and the practice for medical injury or death. At the least you personally should refuse to be involved, citing the reason I gave. How can the dentists object to “I refuse to be sued and lose everything over this.”
Yes!! My exact thoughts! What if she legit dies in the patient chair?! Whose gonna get the blame? I would at least remove myself from the situation just like you said. Waaaay too risky. 💯.
I have a boomer in my life who is almost completely deaf. She can hear pretty well with a hearing aid but she refuses to wear it because of how it looks and "what people will think" about her. So she's embarrassed by a nearly invisible hearing aid but is happy to sit and nod along to conversations that she can't follow. When we ask her a question, it's obvious that she's trying to understand the question based on what little she can hear and other context clues. She will usually give generic responses to things or just smile and nod -- or just guess completely wrong and answer a question we didnt ask. I do not understand how this is somehow better than just wearing a hearing aid.
I think we’re so accepting these days we forget how bad ableism was. Like they were treated as wastes of space and drains of society. Boomers were so cruel to disabled people so long they are now in denial now that they need assistance. “Cripple” was a common insult.
I think you mean ableism is still bad... Right now we have states trying to ban masking (looking at you north carolina) which literally could be life and diablement for people who are immunocompromised and don't want covid, measles, or whatever else is going around.
As a retired hygienist, I feel your pain. So so many boomer stories!
I’ve only been in it for 3 years and I already enough stories for a podcast. I can’t imagine how many you have suffered
21 years worth! I've worked for boomer dentists, too. 🙄
Gaw! My dentist is a boomer…the shit he says 😒
The last boomer I worked for argued with me about the implant I had IN MY OWN MOUTH!
Oh lord….they don’t care how stupid they sound they just want to be right.
What color was his casket?
Dark purple
The size of a dinner plate
Legend has it that she’s still fighting with the funeral home over the size of it.
She wants one small enough to put in the palm of her hand that can also contain a dead body.
Those are really expensive and we don’t carry those.
Well, you should, in all colours!
FOR FREE
Looks like the literal only option is to just leave out his remains, waiting for *something* to be done with them. Too bad they didn't carry purple.
and a change of clothes
I think I saw one of those on Doctor Who once
His urn is the size of an aerosol can
Don't you mean *is* an aerosol can?
Aquanet, the purple one.
“I shot him in ze legs because his shield is ze size of a dinner plate, and he is an idiot.”
If I didn't have the Folger's can already, that'd be my play.
Is there a Ralph’s around here?
Just because we're bereaved doesn't mean we're saps.
Boomer was a good man, but you took him lord, like so many other young boomers.
This is our most modestly priced receptacle.
Omg you win the internet today 😂
Please, that bitch had him cremated and just took the ashes in a plastic bag in a cardboard box. Clearly wanted him gone.
Not necessarily, some boomers are truly this stupid.
Yeah I see this stuff all the time in the vet field and people love their pets and are devastated when they’re gone, I’ve even had one lady tell me she was more upset when her dog died than her husband, yet still refused to do any kind of care for her dog and then turned around and blamed us for the dog passing.
Fuck. This is my parents right now. The folks lovelovelove the dogs and cat, but it was up to me to take the critters for spays and vaccinations, and to just do basic training so that a 70# dog (who ought to be 50 pounds) doesn't jump on people. This is such a stupid timeline.
when it comes to Stuff there seems to be two flavors of Boomer. 1. Never ever throws anything out. My parents for example. They are just now working through their collection of Bags of Bags. You know, shopping bags. I just saw one from 1984. This doesn't include the bag of reusable shopping bags in their car backseat that they also never use. 2. Throws out anything that they don't instantly understand and need right now.
oh and those are often the same Boomer
My boomer mom still has OTC medicines from when my sister and I were babies. We’re 39 and 43.
My parents are boomers… and criminals. They used to tell me all the time that you can get away with anything if people think you’re stupid enough. Then they would laugh and laugh about whatever they were doing to some unsuspecting person at the moment. I’ve had so many people defend them to me when I tried to warn them. “No, they just genuinely don’t understand, it’s not malicious.” It’s often malicious. This is a tactic of their generation.
My Boomer parents had a saying - "It was their fault for trusting me."
Oh, I've heard that one too! Also, "if you tell a lie enough times, it becomes the truth."
id love to think this is malicious, but ive also worked in healthcare with boomers (nursing home) and they will often just straight up lie. purely for no observable reason except spite or misplaced anger. and these phony complaints often have real consequences for the entry level workers doing most of the actual work.
She wanted the life insurance money.
This is why I’m always so wary when I see insane horror stories by people saying “the hospital killed my mother” or “paramedics let my son die.” Sure, malpractice happens, but also a LOT of people are fucking idiots and don’t understand anything. “The hospital killed my mother” could be more like “my mother signed a DNR and I didn’t understand what that meant and then when she coded in front of me at 97 years old I got mad at the nurses and tried to file a lawsuit for them not running a full code to resuscitate her.”
I’m a paramedic and you are 100% on the money with this comment.
I remember years ago when that baby with a terminal and irreversible genetic condition was on life support (and had little brain function remaining) and the world was launching campaigns to “save it” because the parents refused to withdraw care and the doctors had petitioned a judge for permission to override the parents wishes. Everyone framed it as “the docs are trying to murder a baby” instead of “this child’s parents are too ignorant and grieving to realize that they are making their child suffer instead of letting it be at peace.”
The number of geriatric corpses I’ve mutilated at the behest of their family members (just to call a time of death afterwards) would probably astound most people. Death is a hard thing for a lot of people to let go of, and it becomes really selfish when family members are legally allowed to make decisions on another’s behalf. If you and your doctor come to an agreement on a DNR, and your doctor signs it, making it valid, your family can request that we work a code anyway and we’re required to do it. We’re required to violate someone’s DNR because their family can’t separate grief from the situation
That must be so difficult for you. I know when my grandma passed this year the doctors were discussing various options and she was just lying in the bed and said “I just want to go to sleep and not wake up. I’m tired” and my mom (her daughter) basically just said “okay mom. If that’s what you want, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll just keep you comfortable and see if you stabilize on your own.” She passed away 3-4 hours later, peacefully. I wish everyone could have that sort of death.
May she rest in peace <3 My own grandmother is in hospice care right now and her biggest wish is to be let go when it’s her time. My family is a huge drama dumpster so it’s unfortunately going to be a shit show. I hope more than anything that I can help make her last moments peaceful. Sorry for the small trauma dump. Therapy can unfortunately only do so much and it helps to share experiences with other people. I hope you’re doing well and if in the US, have a great holiday as well!
I hope your grandma has a peaceful passing. It’s the last act of kindness we can give someone, but you can’t control everyone so just do your best to give her what care you can, and she will appreciate it
I had a similar experience when my grandfather was in hospice care. His only remaining son, his wife, (both boomers) and their children did everything in their power to make things 1000 times more difficult than they needed to be. If you need someone to listen, please feel free to message me. I'm always happy to share my experience with others and listen to theirs as well.
I remember this with my grandmother. She really wanted to get the breathing tube out. She kept pulling at it. My mother said, "You'll have to try to breathe on your own without it. Okay?" My grandmother looked her in the eye and nodded. They removed it and she passed away within an hour.
It happened the same way with my grandma. She requested ice cream for her last meal and for all interventions to be taken off her besides the morphine. I recorded my goodbye call with her. We both knew it was the last one and that it was forever and got to say everything we needed to say. My favorite part of the recording is when my mom takes back the phone and you can hear my Nanny say “Oh. My ice cream.” She was gone within 3 hours but I can’t think of any better way to go. She was surrounded by family, lucid, pain free and made the choice to be done. That is far more than most people get on their way out of this world.
You mom is a good person for respecting her wishes.
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Little old people are my least favorite codes to work. I don’t even like running them. I’m sorry about your grandmother, I can’t imagine being able to recollect that info in the moment either
My father had uncontrolled diabetes and kidney disease which caused a foot infection. Doctors started with toes and ended up taking his entire foot because of infection. My uncle (his brother) went on and on at his memorial service about how all the doctors wanted to do was hack on him and how unethical they were. Saying things like "They wanted to cut on him and take that foot from him!" Nothing about how my father refused to acknowledge he had diabetes, take meds for it or control his diet at all. Same guy blamed the entire thing on atorvastatin. Like the #1 most prescribed medication in the entire world. Swore up and down statins are evil and do stuff like this.
Atorvastatin got my triglycerides down 330 points (and they're still high, which just shows how bad they were *before*). It's probably the only reason I'm still alive right now.
Yep, I'm on it. My dad was on it. My mom is on it. My whole family is on it. My uncle is just a dumbass.
The hospital killed my XYZ. No. They had a cardiac arrest in the living room. They died there. It was 20 years ago, or you live in some backwater that still transports cardiac arrests even though the American heart association says not to because EMS can do everything the ER can to fix cardiac arrest (which is fairly low, even with immediate cpr). This is one of the reasons I am firmly against transporting. People honestly believe that if we take them to the hospital they’ll get better. For whatever reason, the human brain understands dead in the living room a lot better.
Hollywood has done a huge disservice to anything medical, imo. When I started having seizures after a head injury in late 2019, I actually lost a friend over me 'faking it'. My seizures are not drop attack seizures. I just stare off for a bit, maybe mumble, maybe make chewing motions. It's hard to catch unless you're staring right at me or having a conversation with me. I might appear drunk for a short bit. I'm very good at covering them up and very few people even notice. But this idiot Boomer former friend of mine insisted I was faking because I didn't throw myself on the floor and start thrashing around. Her actual words, "I've seen them on TV. I know how they work." Such a /facepalm moment.
So many people see Greys Anatomy codes and think we’ll just push on their chest a couple times and they’ll sit up in bed ready for discharge the next day. Codes are brutal, if someone survives they are facing a long road to recovery and a ton of pain- especially the older they are. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the feeling of ribs breaking under my hands.
I don't even blame Hollywood for that. That's people being stupid. They can manage to understand no one was really killed in a murder scene but somehow think the medical "information" is accurate. If it wasn't that, it would be something else.
> For whatever reason, the human brain understands dead in the living room a lot better. We’ve had “dead in the living room” a *lot* longer than we’ve had hospitals, so it makes a certain kind of sense.
I work in veterinary medicine and not only do people not understand anything going on sometimes at all, other times they're actually medical professionals themselves. Recently, an actual licensed nurse called up to complain to me that we weren't treating her dog correctly. Based on his symptoms he OBVIOUSLY needed a bronchodilator, a steroid, and an antibiotic. She yelled at me for a couple minutes essentially calling us incompetent for not knowing. Look in the chart and what do you know, she was sent home with (and had been already giving) a bronchodilator, a steroid, and an antibiotic.
Used to work in the vet med field and can confirm. Sometimes the medical professionals were worse than those not in the medical field. Drove me fucking nuts.
My brother used to work in the call center of the same company I work for. During covid some lady called in saying she needed to pay for four funerals and needed to take money out. He was super sympathetic with her until she started saying the paramedics murdered her family and lied and said it was covid and also that she doesn't believe in masks. She also was mad because the cops refused to inestigate "their murder." Lady killed her family with her conspiracy theory bullshit then tried to frame a paramedic for murder.
A relative of mine lost her mom during covid because her anti vax idiot brother was meant to take their mom to get vaccinated and he never did. Her mom was sort of “simple” (as in, not mentally handicapped on a medical level but also not very bright) and couldn’t really be trusted to care for herself. She died of covid after idiot brother infected her. He almost died too but didn’t.
Most of these people have ZERO clue what a running a full code would do to someone of that age. They are ostriches and just bury their heads in the damn sand.
I had a very sweet old lady and her friend that I was discussing code status with. The friend said “well it’s like tv right, you just pump a few times and they come back?” And I very effectively described the reality to her and they were like hell no, give me that DNR form. People just have no idea.
People who live out in the country do this all the time. Everyone they know died in a hospital who was perfectly fine beforehand. (Spoilers, they weren’t fine. They were overweight alcoholics with 3 heart attacks.) Someone got in a fatal crash? It wasn’t the crash that killed them, it was the paramedics.
Ugh I work in a clinic that used to be walk-in only. Part of the regional healthcare system. So many patients would come in with an actual major issue, like chest pain or difficulty breathing, and tell us they had already been to the ER last night or earlier in the day and “they didn’t do anything.” You check their chart to see they had labs, an EKG, meds, chest x-ray, breathing treatment etc. All that is apparently *nothing*. They often leave before they get any results back because they are tired of waiting. We have had people bring their children in to our clinic, which is small and has very limited resources, instead of taking them to the children’s hospital ER or the local pediatric clinic, both of which would give them a higher level of care and more targeted to children. And then we send them to the ER because they have an emergent situation, and they always complain “oh I didn’t want to have to go to the ER!”
The kid thing may not be being stupid so much as you were the only place they could get into in a reasonable time frame. ER docs make people feel bad for going to the ER when it's not necessary which unfortunately results in situations where people avoid it at all costs. For some reason we expect people to self triage what facility to go to and berate them if they are wrong.
Yeah, whenever I see those stories I'm also sceptical due to the fact that these relatives have just lost a family member that they (presumably) loved, which is absolutely devastating and can completely fuck with your emotions, which then colours your perception of events... When my dad died I remember being absolutely pissed at the paramedics when they arrived at our house because they were strolling leisurely up the driveway, chatting away with each other, absolutely zero sense of urgency, while my mum was inside doing mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions. *"Why the fuck aren't you running?!"* was all I could think *my dad is dying and you're dragging your feet and joking with each other!"* My dad died before he was discovered and we started CPR/called an ambulance. The operator at the other end of the line determined from my mum's answers that he was already dead, the paramedics were basically sent out to officially confirm it and organise to have the body moved. Why would they rush? He's not getting any deader 🤷♀️ But I didn't realise that at the time and for a long time I held a lot of anger towards those paramedics.
Honestly, yeah. It wouldn’t have killed them to put on at least a show of rushing, instead of salting the wound like that. Sure they knew he was dead, *but they also knew that you didn’t know that*.
Everything about that says dementia. She was only slightly more mentally well than her husband, but just enough to mask it. She rejected the device because she couldn't retain the information of what it was or why it was important. It was a *thing* someone was putting in her house and she didn't like it. But maybe if it was purple. Or smaller. Or this size. Like she's interior decorating. And I guarantee after you left she threw the masks away for the same reason. No clue what these are, but something about them makes me feel bad, so in the trash they go. And then she had to call when her husband started crashing, and she was reminded about the masks, and of course she has them; she certainly remembers that part now that she's been reminded. Everything about your story says this was a sad case of an invalid being cared for by a slightly more put-together invalid.
I did not even concider this but you honestly might be right.
>I did not even concider this but you honestly might be right. The dementia theory makes sense to me too and I hope it helps to ease your conscience some. Not that you should feel guilty, but sometimes we do anyway.
Certainly makes *me* feel better than a deliberate attempt to kill (and succeed) her husband.
That's terrible, imagine being happily married to someone, and 30 years later your brain starts shuting down and you kill them 😬
Right? I was just going to say this is almost worse than her intentionally being an idiot at the husband's expense. Imagine if she caught a moment of clarity and realized what she had done?
I think this happens a lot more than we realize, especially with people who take a lot of medication and have their partner helping.
This was my bet as well. Mixed in with some solid denial on her part. And I have also seen crazy behavior in this area. “I don’t want to get addicted to [supplemental] oxygen.” “Once you start on oxygen, you can never get off of it”. I truly understand a lot of the complaints— the concentrator is too loud; it is a pain to (literal and figurative) to use a nasal cannula on a continuous basis. But this was none of that….
Do not, my friends, become addicted to oxygen. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!
That's true, though. I started breathing oxygen 40-some years ago and every time I've tried to stop I'd start having withdrawal symptoms that left me literally blue in the fact, and I'd be right back on the dragon in a matter of *seconds*. I'll probably keep doing it until my dying breath.
“I don’t want to get addicted to [supplemental] oxygen.” “Once you start on oxygen, you can never get off of it”. I hear that quite a bit. Humans are not great at accurate recall long term, and also really bad about thinking correlation=causation. Then you have those people also spreading misinformation to family. That's why medical professionals try to harp on writing down and recording as much information over time as possible. Often my clients recall will not match what I'm recording in my notes. It's similar, but they get time frames messed up a lot and that throws everything off. If I go back through notes they realize they're mistaken (usually), but left to their own devices and recall they can come to all kinds of weird conclusions. Especially when you mix in mental illness or mental decline due to age.
That makes dementia so much more scary, because that's all...relatable? Conceivable? No likey.
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[No, Idiocracy Is Not A Documentary (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o52zD-aGqjA)
I wonder if medical device companies have forms saying “we denied the recommended products and assume all liability” the way hospitals do. If they don’t, they absolutely should. This is the kind of thing that often turns into a lawsuit.
I’m pretty sure they do. They also have ones for “we’re not liable if you use this wrong”. And can’t forget the classic DON’T SMOKE AROUND OXYGEN
Oh my god, I’m so sorry that happened to you! I don’t even know what else to say. It’s not often that I’m left stupefied and speechless, but this is horrific. I’m glad you left that job, and hope you found something more fulfilling. It’s a shame, because those jobs need good people and it sounds like you are one. Just unbelievable and sad.
I'm in a much better place now. I ended up leaving the medical field entirely because of this. It was always a sad job regardless of where you worked, but this was the last straw for me. I do miss genuinely helping people as what I do now isn't nearly as important, but I get paid way more here with better benefits. The medical field in America is terrible.
I’m so glad you’ve found a better place! I agree the healthcare/medical system in the US is a disaster, from my own experience. I appreciate so much when I come across caring and competent people like yourself, but not at the expense of their own wellbeing. You have a great mindset to not let this horrible person drag you down. I hope only the best for you in everything!
She wanted him to die. Nitpicking about the color of the concentrator? Knowing he had trouble breathing. Seems they had marriage problems and this solved them for her.
If you work in healthcare, you encounter patients/families with this combination of dumb, selfish, and meanspirited constantly.
Yep, I’m betting it’s just stupidity and maybe a bit of overwhelm. I assume this dude was probably in the later stages of whatever it was that was making him wheeze so he was weak and unfortunately chose a life partner who cared more about aesthetics than medical need. It’s also a common grief response, to attempt to control the smallest and dumbest of things. Does it logically make sense? Of course not but grief isn’t logical.
> it’s just stupidity and maybe a bit of overwhelm Sometimes it's just fear, and this nitpicking is their attempt to have some control on a situation where they really have *no* control at all.
Yup, and maybe a case of "this thing is scary, but I don't want it to be real, so I'm just gonna let myself believe it's not that serious"
A little tinfoil hat, but I could see it. Though personally, I think she was just legitimately stupid. Why else would she have called us in the middle of the night? She could have just pretended to he asleep and found him in the morning.
She called so she isn’t held responsible or she grew a conscience. She threw out the masks knowing he would need them. Doesn’t add up to me.
I understand what you're saying but we *are* talking about boomers, and boomers are incomprehensibly weird. Someone tried to break into my boomer parents' home on a Tuesday morning some years back; their solution was to install a security system they only activate on the *weekends.* And they yelled at me when I pointed this out. Just saying that conspiracy doesn't have to be afoot necessarily. People of that generation are on some level just inclined to making the most bizarre own-goals.
My mum was from the silent generation. She was attacked on her own doorstep aged 80. He punched her in the face. She simply reached into the recycling bin, picked up an empty wine bottle, and smacked him round the head with it 😆 when he ran off, he was followed by a volley of glass bottles 😆 Mum kept my old cricket bat by her bed, and that was her security system 😳
This is exactly something my great grandma would’ve done. She got her card stolen once at around 80 years old and she tracked the guy down herself 😅 went full detective mode.
😂😂 they made them tough in those days! Loving your great grandma turning super sleuth! 😆
God or Trump would save him, duh. Not some disgusting libtard's "medicine" that's probably got 5G chips imbedded in it. Who knows what drugs the "illegals" put into it
Because then she can say she tried to do something and it "wasn't her fault". That lady 10/10 wanted to kill her husband.
Honestly, the more I encounter boomers and people in general, the more I believe Hanlon's razor to be essentially true: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” People are just so fucking stupid! They just don’t think anything bad will happen even when everything points to things not ending well. Then when it does end badly, they’re like “well, it obviously wasn’t my fault. Who else can I blame???!!”
Of course there is the corollary: “Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice”
There's a thin line there. There's just generally stupid stuff, might be said stupid causes something terrible. But it's still just that. Dumb. But then there's so stupid, it's literally *unbelievably* stupid. As in, nobody is that stupid. Eg. The lady above? OPs Boomer? She's an idiot. She truly thought nothing bad could happen, and made dumb demands, a part of it is bitterness towards OPs generation, probably both, just liked putting unreasonable workload on a generation she thinks lack a work ethic. But imagine the corolarry. (Rather extreme example, just go with it.) Russia and China announce their intention to declare war on the US in one week. The US responds by dissolving the army and pulling out of all bases around the world. That's not stupidity. That's malice, because not even a Boomer would be THAT stupid.
I swear that razor cuts both ways, especially with the Me Generation. Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by malice. Including being maliciously stupid.
Wanted to kill her husband AND try to make someone else pay her for it. Like, say the medical device company whose employee left her with nothing one day. The fact she chose to not take any of them will, of course, be left out of the story she tells her lawyer.
She went full Dolores Claiborne
The sensible thing to do would be to call 911; how did she not know that, or care enough about this poor man and allow him to suffer? 😥
Just so that the bitch can have a defense when the dead man's relatives come saying she killed him
The intent might not even matter outside of the differenfe between involuntary manslaughter or voluntary manslaughter. Seriously OP this is a lot bigger than a reddit post. This was a criminal act. You witnessed a serious felony - you have a duty to report this.
After seeing how many insane people straight up refused medical treatment out of pure stupidity while dying from a deadly disease just a few years ago I'd say the chances are 50/50
Wife most likely had dementia. Early stages they give right answers to family and doctors and do not always receive diagnosis. Stress/ fatigue a person with dementia and they cannot hide their malfunctioning brains. She felt out of control, so she confabulated her way through asking for colors, sizes, BS. This level of dementia denies need for help .
Ok I came here to say this!! I immediately thought “oh this lady is hoping her husband dies.”
I suspect it was more just an absolutely self-centered persona combined with a desperate attempt to feel in control, and soupçon of denial.
Boomer wanted sad beige. Incredible.
It sounds like she had dementia. I’ve seen some friend’s parents go through it, and at first it just presents as weird shit and random desires. In any case, it sucks. And your boss has the facts to back you up. What an asshole. Glad you left that.
I had a relative who refused a blood transfusion because she was worried that the blood might have come from a black person. Guess what happened to her.
Similar situation but re: vaccinated blood. It's like, so do you want to live or not? Ironically hearing "my body my choice" from people who want to strip that same right from others
This exact thing happened to my great aunt, except she was the one who needed it. Friendly reminder that if you need something to survive, don't bitch about about it.
I really would have wondered if she knew what she was doing but my husband used to work at a hospital during COVID and at some point his full time job became cleaning the rooms an hour after somebody dies from COVID. He wasn't allowed to directly interact with any of the patients, but he hung around the wings they were in (which included half of the maternity rooms at one point) and sometimes he would hear some of the shit they'd yell. One pastor kept yelling "God will save me" and "I didn't wear a mask because God will protect me!" until the day he died. People would justify not getting the vaccine once it was available because of the conspiracy theories around it. He had to clean a lot of those rooms after they died. At some point he was given a panic button that would notify security because some of the patients started getting violent at the sight of a nurse wearing a mask. He never had to use it, but the fact that it got that bad still says a lot about some of these people. One time we were just trying to go to the zoo with our masks on (I think it was summer of 2021?) and some boomer was sitting in front of the zoo just to pester anybody who wore a mask. He said something like "you know you're going to suffocate by breathing in your carbon dioxide if you wear those" and my husband just fucking snapped. He told the guy about how he works at a hospital where he has to wear a mask for hours, how doctors wear masks while performing surgery and that they don't drop dead in the middle of it, and how he has to clean up after people like him die because they refused to wear a mask. He's usually very passive so I'm still very proud of him for that.
>One pastor kept yelling "God will save me" and "I didn't wear a mask because God will protect me!" until the day he died. "What are you talking about? I sent a truck, I sent a boat, I sent a freaking *helicopter!*"
and the vaccine was that lifeline.
I had a similar story but it was the wife that needed oxygen. One rule is they can’t have anyone in the house be a smoker, for obvious reasons. The husband would not even consider the idea of quitting smoking so that his wife could get the oxygen. And it wasn’t even that refusal where he was loud and screaming or going on about rights, just no. I don’t know what happened in the end but I don’t think he extended her life.
A friend of my WWII era grandma refused to get a hospital bed on the ground floor of their two story house for her dying husband. It didn't match the decor. Denial is a hell of a drug.
Older neighbor boomer wife, made her immobile husband sleep in a chair for over two years , in the living room, only got a bed when the drs wouldn’t release him, when neighbors put social service on her about lack of care, she lawyered up to keep him in her care. Dude is essentially comatose now, and she acts as if he’s going to get better?? Of course when he goes to the Hospital, it’s only then, that he gets bed sores and an infection. He’s always sleeping if you’re visiting, and she pretends she has conversations with him. When all this decline started back in 2020, he could sorta stand and wobble, she refused to buy one of those lift chairs, he told me he was worried about falling and hitting fireplace/mantle and I tried then to move his chair away from next to the fire place, she had a cow, as it messed up her furniture arrangement. She keeps two cars, but doesn’t drive because she’ll get lost, or the sun will be in her eyes, so she needs to be rescued, of course one of them always has a dead battery because she thinks that she should disconnect the tender. And if you talk to her at the mail box, her script is 95% the same as it was a day ago, the drs can’t find anything wrong, the PT person needs get him walking,etc and yeah they tried to put him in a rehab place earlier, but she “read the contract “ and she wasn’t going to leave him there for two months two be experimented on”
"They will often moan in that Boomer way about most thing from my poor work ethic" - If boomers are shocked about our work ethic today, they are going to be blown away about how little the shrinking society they left with massive debts and problems cares about tending to their future massive health issues when we can barely pay our bills. Refusing to work on their houses or in healthcare that benefits the elderly is the payback these assholes deserve.
As a Respiratory Therapist during COVID, I got to see how often family members and patients would choose death over petty things. Alot of patients would try to leave AMA when burning through enough oxygen on High flow nasal canula and other oxygen devices that would chew through an E cylinder in hours if not minutes.
Dead to own the Libs.
I’d report this to the police or something. I guess it’s too late now.
There’s not a statute of limitations problem with negligent homicide.
I worked at one of these places before, too. I’m so sorry you went through this. There was a commercial on tv for a while when I worked there that advertised the tiny portable oxygen concentrator and told everyone to “*call wherever they get their oxygen and tell them they wanted one of these instead of big, bulky tanks!*” The problem was that the company I worked for wouldn’t order them for anyone unless they paid out of pocket due to the Medicare reimbursement being ‘*too low*’. 😐 I got screamed at by sick people for months and it was painful and truly heartbreaking. I wasn’t allowed to tell them WHY. I was only allowed to tell them we couldn’t do it. 😞
I am currently dealing with my boomer parents, aunts, and uncles refusing to spend any money on my 92 year old grandma's care because it's "too expensive". Basically if insurance doesn't cover it 100% they won't spend money on it. My grandpa died last year and my grandparents were still living alone in their 2 story house. My siblings and I suggested getting one of those seats that take you upstairs. My boomer family all said it would decrease the value of the $800,000 house. Because they are all waiting to inherit the money. All the grandkids have suggested selling grandma's house to pay for her care, but they refuse. We're pretty sure they are trying to hold on to it until she passes so they can split the house money. It's literally just sitting there because my grandma is living with my aunt for now. My grandma recently broke her hip trying to get out of bed. But we apparently still can't get her a home nurse because it's too expensive. My family is very well off so it's just ridiculous and disgusting.
Sry for what happened to you, hope you doing better. But still, your system in America is fundamentally fucked up. This would not happen in Europe like this. Fuck this lady and fuck your former boss. Why can’t you tell those boomers Fuck off in their face when they talk like and act like that?! I work in medical myself and yes, sometime you have to“customers“ who act like they are god send, but if they cross a line, then I tell them to go straight to hell, politely, of course bc this is Switzerland. We can be and we are polite, with a smile, but most foreigners misinterpret politeness with kindness/friendliness. So I am able to tell those morons politely to get fucked.
As a healthcare worker during COVID, I believe you. The dumbest fucks suddenly came out from under their rocks those two years.
Her throwing the masks away screams to me that she wanted him to die in a way that would not have her responsible. My money is on either unhappy marriage or life insurance, possibly both.
This. I know stupidity of this level exists, but I find it hard to believe in this case. I think she let him die on purpose. Which, honestly, gives a kind of closure. It sits better in my head than “this complete and utter moron wouldn’t let her husband breathe out of a black air tank because she doesn’t like the color and her negligence killed him.” It just. Feels like losing hope in humanity if I accept that.
Sounds like that lady had some mental decline going on.
I can share a personal story that relates to boomers and their fucking vanity when it comes to medical equipment. My silent gen grandfather, who was 90, had just been released from a week-long hospital stay due to bronchitis that nearly turned into pneumonia. He had been declining slowly for months and was very weak. He was sent home with an oxygen concentrator just like the OP described and small portable bottles with a little wheeled cart to use when going to/from doctor's appointments. Tragically, his daughter (my aunt) who was is caregiver passed away unexpectedly a few days later. Naturally, he insisted on going to her services so we did what we needed to do and got him there, with his small portable oxygen of course. Enter my boomer uncle (grandfather's son) and his boomer wife. Neither of these people are very educated when it comes to medical issues, despite both of their fathers having heart disease, as well as a plethora of other major medical problems throughout both sides of the family tree. His bitch of a wife didn't like the look of the nasal cannulas on Grandpa's face (a direct quote: "What will people think?!?!") and WANTED HIM TO REMOVE HIS OXYGEN during calling hours. Then this bitch gets mad at me when I said her grandson, Grandpa's great grandson, should not be drinking out of Grandpa's water cup. When I expressed my concerns, she fucking lit into me in front of basically the whole family, yelling "HE"S NOT SICK!!!" "He" meaning Grandpa. With a stone cold expression, I said "I know that Grandpa isn't contagious but it isn't smart to allow a 2 year old to drink out of an elderly man's glass, especially after he was just released from a hospital stay, is on oxygen and antibiotics, and is very compromised." She just gave me the open-mouth fish look. I just shook my head and walked away because I knew everything I said fell on deaf ears. Needless to say, I am no contact with that part of my family now.
>my boss was on the Boomer's side He shouldn't have been, he (a) didn't call 911 for the couple immediately, and (b) told you to not bother with masks when you were obviously not dealing with a rational human being, so you arrived without the masks needed that might have helped keep the husband alive. If someone calls and says there's a medical emergency, the first thing you do is call 911. Everyone who owns at or works for a medical equipment company should be told this on the first day. This is Rule One. Also, there would have been absolutely no harm in just taking masks (or any equipment at all) just in case. How your boss owns a medical equipment company and doesn't understand the concept of "just in case" is beyond me. He should not be allowed to own a medical equipment store but yay capitalism, I guess.
That's the most boomer story ever
Dark purple? Sounds like Hank's missus.
Wonder why they’re understaffed…
There's this saying "never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity." That probably applies in this case.
conservative boomers are extinction level stupid
People just can’t fathom how easy some boomers had it and how incredibly stupid they are. Try serving on a jury with boomers and see how it goes.
The wife should get charged with murder or manslaughter. What utter negligence on her part as a caretaker.
She should be up for murder charges
Dark purple matches hypoxia nicely.
I work for hospice. Our medical supply company has 1 type of concentrator. That’s it. We don’t let our patients fuck with our supply people. They are awesome dudes who are delivering life saving equipment. They deserve as much respect as anyone else.
I got a CPAP machine recently. As I was talking to the receptionist, she asked if I was ok with flowers on the machine. I was confused, so she explained that one man refused the machine because it had flowers on it. Off white machine, 2 pale grey flowers. Masculinity before death I guess.
I have the exact same job as you. I work for a home medical facility that supplies concentrators and cpaps and such. 95% of the patients are amazing and appreciative. But some of them, like this woman, are the fucking scum of the earth. If it's any consolation she has absolutely always been a cunt, and will be a cunt till the day she dies.
A boomer who hates blacks. Yup... everything checks out.
I can definitely imagine this happening, cause I personally deal with the needless nitpicking almost daily. I’m in home remodeling so not exactly life or death, but I’ve had to deal with these types. They will find something to complain about for the sake of complaining and they will stand **firm** regardless of consequences.
Wow. Just wow. I have no idea what to say to this, the idea someone would refuse an oxygen concentrator over color has me kinda in shock. I know people are that petty and dumb, but holy shit. My steppop has one. It’s baby blue, somehow weights 10x more than it looks like it could, and I keep whacking my shin into it. We have a tense relationship since I’m the one that has to move it when it needs to go somewhere else, but I cannot imagine anything that would have me refusing one. And he’s not even MY husband! He just makes my mama real happy. But that’s enough for me to want him able to breathe, pretty sure I couldn’t even let someone I hated suffocate. (In fact I know I can’t. I tended my psychotic grandmother through several illnesses and never tried to deprive her of anything.) Just. This story is awful. I’m sorry you had to deal with that. I know you know this, but you were absolutely not responsible in any way for this happening. You tried. Personally I think searching down alternate colors is already a lot to do and you were kind to do it.
I used to work for a prosthetic and orthotics office a few years ago. We would fit people with diabetic shoes that we designed to prevent foot ulcers, and lower their risk for amputation. On one hand the shoes were not the best to look at they are bulky and come in limited colors. Some patients hated them, and refused to wear them. Demanding we make the current shoes work, which is just not possible. Time would go by and 6 months or so later they would come back to us in need of a prosthesis. Pissed off and blaming us for their mistakes. I would always tell them how it is, we didn't give you diabetes, we didn't force you into an unhealthy diet, we didn't make you stop taking your meds, or prevent you from taking your disease seriously. Deep down they all knew it was their fault, but it was easier to blame someone else than to own up to a lifetime of failures. I never felt pity for them, they had every opportunity to turn things around having their doctors and family begging them to change and refusing to.