Why The News Can Be Depressing - Worrying About The Future of Our Special Needs Son

Everybody's upset over the new Gillette ad. I think we should be. The ad, instead of telling us how great their razors are and that we should buy them, tries to shame every man on the planet for being male. Objectively, I think it was a well-made 'short film'. As far as the visual and audio effects go, they correspond exactly with what the narration says. The juxtaposition of the two boys play-fighting with the gang of bullies chasing a boy, the hurtful online messages as this gang rampages through a living room, tells us in a very visual way that the filmmaker believes that innocent play-fighting leads to not-so-playful fighting and to bullying later on. The single voices, both at the beginning and in the 'video' segment led off by Ana Kasparian of the Young Turks, are quickly overwhelmed by other voices until there is no meaning to the babble yet we know they're all saying the same thing as certain words pop out of the cacophony. The two fathers, one breaking up the backyard play-fight and the one stopping the beating by the bully gang, once again reinforces the filmmaker's belief that play-fighting leads to harmful bullying later on. Visually and audibly, it's a very good 'film'.

It's wrong as heck, but it's a very good 'film'. I wonder what Proctor and Gamble's shareholders think of it.

The Gillette ad was breaking all over the internet so it's no wonder that the story of a woman in a persistent vegetative state giving birth this past December slid under the radar and down the stream. It wasn't even publicly reported until this past week or so. The short and dirty: a 29-year-old woman, who has been in a persistent vegetative state for 26 years, gave birth at the end of December. No one at the care facility knew she was pregnant until she went into labor and began moaning. The CEO of the organization resigned, the police are collecting DNA samples from the men who work at the facility to try and determine who raped this woman.

A link to one of the stories is here. This story includes the 5 minute 11 second 911 call about the baby.

Here is one explanation of the differences between a coma and a persistent vegetative state.

We have an adult special-needs child. He is autistic and we're getting older. At some point, sooner now than later, he will need to go into a long-term care facility. The story about this woman concerns me because my son will be in one of these facilities. Not necessarily in one run by the organization overseeing the Arizona facility, but this isn't a one-off story. Over the years I've read stories about various facilities where abuse of all sorts went on and were only discovered accidentally, as was the case with this patient. Non-verbal or pre-verbal patients have been targeted for abuse because they cannot tell what is happening to them. Our son is pre-verbal.

If this were another time, we'd arrange for our other children to watch over him, keep him at their houses, share the duties back and forth, but that is neither necessary nor optimal. Long-term care facilities exist and they employ staff specifically trained to deal with therapy, medication, and medicine for special-needs patients. They have more access to information about the long-term side effects of certain medications, they know which blood tests to order to determine whether a medicine has outlived its purpose or not. The staff comes on for a shift and then goes home, so no one is dealing with patients all day every day. In a perfect world, the facilities win hands-down.

This isn't a perfect world. This is only the latest scandal. Even the best places now may go downhill. It happens.

We'll visit him once we find a good place, we'll keep an eye on things, but at some point, we'll die. Our other children could also check in on him, but one's husband is in the military so they won't always be in the area, and the other's husband is in school and may find work in his chosen field elsewhere. Our son may find himself alone and vulnerable and unable to communicate what is happening, and it may not be discovered until it's too late, if it's discovered at all. That's happened in the past; there's no reason to believe it won't happen in the future.

I also know a family who had bad things happen to their special-needs adult. This is anecdotal, but as a parent of a vulnerable person, it preys on my mind. The parents had passed on, and the sister and her husband showed up to visit the patient. He'd lost an eye. They asked, but no one at the facility knew anything about it. This happened more than sixty years ago so turning a blind eye to abuse, or to patient-on-patient violence, has been going on for a long time. Abrogating responsibility is as old as the human species, as is taking advantage of the lesser-abled among us.

I can research facilities, look into their histories, satisfy myself about an organization's commitment to patients, make the right choice for now, only to have the place go downhill later on. We want the best for our child but that bar keeps moving. I don't know what to do.