Why I’m happy to head to a retirement home
Gourmet meals and flash amenities? Rest home living isn’t the sentence it was 20 or more years ago, writes Felicity Price.
OPINION: The retirement announced last week of Simon Challies from Ryman Healthcare because of advancing Parkinsons is a poignant reminder that, no matter how fit and active we might be, people over a certain age can be immobilised out of the blue, stricken with a debilitating disease that eventually no amount of medication and fitness can obliterate.
The illustrious Simon from Ryman, as he is affectionately known, is only in his mid-40s, yet here he is with, as he put it, ‘‘the outlook of an 80-year-old’’.
While I, at 65, sometimes feel I have the knees of an 80-year-old, I can relate to Challies who found, out of adversity, the ability to stand in the shoes of the people you are working or interacting with every day.
For him, he said, having trouble even brushing his own teeth gave him tremendous empathy for what the residents in Ryman’s villages were going through, needing assistance with their everyday lives.
So, in the past six years, he’s put a lot of effort into improving his residents’ daily care – and that’s going to benefit an awful lot of people. Because Ryman, valued at $4.9 billion and with 28 villages around New Zealand (and two in Australia), is the biggest retirement village operator in the country.
For me, that adversity was cancer, which struck me in my 40s and gave me a similarly empathetic view of the world. Not that I was in a position to improve the care of thousands of people, but it led me to do something for the community I’d taken for granted for so long.
Twenty years later, I still do my best to put something back, but I also make sure that bucket list of wishes is being worked through.
There’s no point going to the grave wishing I’d had more fun, or been to those places on Earth that have to be investigated.
But I was lucky. My debilitation was temporary. It could be cut out, chemotherapied, Tamoxifened, and hopefully obliterated. Parkinsons is a stayer. Worse, it’s a gradual, painful, severely disabling disease that requires increasing caregiver support and, most likely in late stages, rest home care.
These days, largely thanks to Ryman and the other rest homes keeping up to the Ryman mark, rest home care and retirement village living isn’t the sentence it was 20 or more years ago.
Forget the boiled cabbage and stew for dinner with foul cooking smells permeating the corridors. These days there are gourmet meals on offer, such as oven-baked fish with aioli and panko crumbs, and zucchini stuffed with quinoa and tomato; finished off with salted caramel lava cakes. What’s not to like about that?
It’s all very well to say it now, when rest home living is hopefully still a few years away, but I don’t have an aversion to selling up and moving into one of those nice retirement villages where there are big surround-sound home theatres, fully equipped gyms, heated lane swimming pools and scooter parks – not the fold-up ones the kids use but the motorised ones you sit on and whiz around the neighbourhood collecting speeding tickets.
Yup. Sell the house, buy a much cheaper unit in a nearby retirement village and pocket the change. The kids will claim it sooner or later, or you can spend it on a trip on the trans-Siberian or to the game parks of Africa. While you still can. Parkinsons could be just around the corner – seize the day!
Felicity Price, ONZM, writes bestselling chook lit – funny, fast-paced romancesuspense for the over 50s. Read more at felicityprice.com.