Water Water Everywhere

I was interested to see on the news this morning that there is a new initiative to get old people in care homes to drink more water - up to 10 glasses a day! Well, I can see that there is a problem with people not drinking enough and I agree that dehydration is dangerous and can lead to a whole load of health problems.

However, I do wonder if those advocates of this new scheme have really thought this through. Has it not occurred to them that perhaps one of the causes of dehydration in old people is that they can’t hold their water in the first place! It is a well known fact that incontinence is one of the main symptoms of old age. So - you encourage an old incontinent care home resident to drink 10 glasses of water a day. This person is already peeing himself every 20 minutes or so. The next thing you know, his bed linen has to be changed that much more often and he‘s sinking in a sea of pee. When he’s not peeing the bed he’s wetting the Shackleton’s High Back chair so its all nice and soggy and steamy for the next unfortunate inmate. Now, this is only one person I am talking about here out of a whole care home. Multiply this by 60 or so and it doesn’t take long to see there will soon be a huge urinic tidle wave of a problem sweeping through the hitherto peaceful haven where you could previously relax in the morning to the soothing sounds of geriatric lips sucking on their morning toast! Now no one is in their chairs, because they are all queuing to get into the one loo open to the residents, beating wildly on the door with their walking sticks and Zimmer frames.

So, we now have a situation where the bed sheets have to be changed and washed that much more frequently. The furniture has to be thrown out and changed every couple of weeks or so. Building contractors have to be called in to design and build more loos. More staff have to be employed, including a tripling of the cleaning staff rotas to cope with all the puddles of old person’s pee issued by those who didn’t make it to the loo in time.

Actually, its all a big conspiracy. You see, care home owners don’t actually care at all for their inmates. They are in it for the money and nothing else. When was the last time you saw a poor care home owner?? No, my friends, what is going on here is a cunning plan hatched up by these greedy parasites who feed on other people’s misery, to make loads and loads of even more money, while duping everyone that they are really concerned about their residents health. Behind this smokescreen, they will vastly increase the care home fees, already at the level of utter usury, thus swelling their coffers while their inmates have hosepipes shoved down their throats and water forced at gunpoint into their distended stomachs in the name of healthy living.

The truth is, that it is not in the interests of care home owners to have healthy residents. If they were healthy, then they wouldn’t be there in the first place and the owners would be out of business. All the residents really want is to sit staring at each other with a nice warm insipid cup of (diuretic) tea and Songs of Praise blaring from the box as they await their turn to enter the happy hunting grounds.

Gosh, thirsty work this writing lark - I think I need a glass of water!