Last Titanic survivor sells Mementos

MA-Caver

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Found this to be sad reflection upon care for the elderly, respect for history and the state of things.
Wish I had the money, five grand doesn't seem like a lot but it's definitely enough to this grand dame.
Last Titanic survivor sells mementos to pay for care 1 hour, 22 minutes ago
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081016/en_afp/britaintitanichistoryauction
LONDON (AFP) - The last remaining survivor of the Titanic disaster is auctioning mementos from the doomed liner to pay for her nursing home fees, a newspaper said Thursday.

Millvina Dean was only two months old when the Titanic struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sank in 1912, but now at the age of 96 she is struggling to make ends meet and hopes to make 3,000 pounds (3,845 euros, 5,171 dollars) from the sale.
Personal items going under the hammer include a 100-year-old suitcase filled with clothes given to her family by the people of New York after they arrived there following the catastrophe.
Dean has lived in a nursing home for the last two years.
"I was hoping to be here for two weeks after breaking my hip but I developed an infection and have been here for two years. I am not able to live in my home any more," she told the Southern Daily Echo newspaper.
AFP/File Photo: Millvina Dean, the last remaining survivor of the Titanic disaster, seen here in 2002, is...
You'd figure that the hospital would've managed in the last three years to figure out that this lady is going to need help paying her bills and would've found or at least been searching for a solution.
Hope this lady manages to find a way to live out the rest of her years in dignity.
 

exile

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Dead right, MAC.

There's another point in the story: a broken hip in an elderly person is usually a life-changing event in a very bad way. It's not just any old fracture, or even any old fracture but more so. It seems to open the doors to all kind of horrible complications, infections and system declines. My mother has done it twice, and each time the toll it took went way beyond what you might expect.

Part of the problem is that, as we were told, a hip break is often not a cause, but an effect. The loss of balance and orientation frequently points to an underlying ominous condition, anything from cancer to neuromuscular degeneration to circulatory system atrophy—any one of which is a very big, very bad deal for elderly people especially. One of the scary side effects is often cognitive: people go in for hip surgery and come out with what looks like impaired mental functioning, maybe even apparent dementia. No one is quite sure what's going on with that... probably a bunch of quite different factors all working together negatively... but those hips need protection.
 
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