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Everyone assumes that people only go to the nursing home to prepare for death, while that is certainly true for some people it is not true for everyone who lives in a nursing home.

I have worked in nursing homes from 2002 until 2007 and I seen more people leave the nursing homes to go home with families or to assisted living facilities then I have seen die.

Twenty years ago, when nursing homes were full of senior citizens at the end of their lives and close to death, I would have said nursing homes are for those older people who are dying. An upsurge in medical technology has made living longer and more productive lives a reality for those people who would have died without said treatment.

In the nursing home were I worked recently there were a few men in their early thirties and forties who have had strokes, and they needed constant medical attention. They were not ill enough to be in the hospital so they were put on the rehabilitation unit so they could receive help by trained medical professionals as needed.

All three men who stayed at that nursing home for at least 6 months until they required very little help and all of them went back to their families. Last, I heard two of them were back to work, supporting their families. None of these men certainly had come there to die, they came to heal their bodies and regain the strength they had lost.

There are also two females between the ages of 35 and 45 who are residents, neither will ever leave the nursing home and there is no way their families can take care of them. They will live out the next twenty to thirty years of their lives in a nursing home until God takes them home once more.

Those are a few of our youngest residents, but there are plenty more people living in a nursing home with medical needs. Every one who lives in a nursing home has medical needs of some type, and those needs prevent them from living alone any longer. Very few residents come there to die the majority of them go on to live long lives with the medical advances that technology has made possible.

There are several residents on required thicken water or pureed foods to live, and a nursing home provides these items so that those people can live longer. A few residents who cannot eat because of throat disabilities have feed tubes live in the nursing home. Plenty of residents require oxygen, which comes through outlets on the walls for those who require it, and there is a whole floor for those residents. Medical technology had made their lives possible, good or bad those advances are here to stay.

If you think that nursing homes are just for the dying members of society, please think again. Get in there and volunteer an hour or so of your day doing something nice that will brighten up someone's day.

Learn more about this author, Amy Browne.
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