Chatting in this forum is fine, but I'm only interested in exchanges with other nursing home residents, not outsiders.
Hi Bushrod,
Welcome to Senior Forums. If you don't find a pen pal, maybe interacting in this forum with other members will fulfill the need in a similar way, or click here to link to a thread in this forum where you may find some useful information about pen pals.
Pretty sure we don't have any nursing home members here at the moment. Sorry, Bushrod. If that's the only topic you wish to talk about, perhaps there are some here with the experience of having a loved one in a nursing home at some point if you wish to loosen your conversation restrictions a bit?
What is the reason you want to close yourself off from "outsiders", as you call us?
It's safer, nursing home resident or not, to chat with people on a public forum, rather than giving their personal information, email, phone number, etc. to a perfect stranger.
I’d be very concerned about this no matter what the OP says. There are lots of con artists out there so I see no reason to trust any stranger.
Agreed.
I'm quite happy to communicate with other nursing home residents on public forums, in public. Nothing to hide. No nefarious purposes. Nor do I have any vested interest in sharing personal info (which I've never done yet). I'm just not interested in wasting my time with people not in nursing homes who just cannot possibly "get it." I'm here for life and the nursing home experience is at the moment the only thing I want to correspond about.
Not for me. After not being disabled a day in my life, I suddenly at the age of 78 became totally, permanently disabled, confined to a nursing home that I'll never be able to leave. The ONLY thing I want to communicate about is the Nursing Home Experience because it's the absolutely central, by far most important element of my life.
Not really. However loved those loved ones may have been, there's no possible way that outsiders, however empathetic, can grasp the reality of being permanently in a nursing home. I'm not at all interested in sympathy, only in mutually shared experiences. Now, if you had members who had spent significant amounts of time (months, years) in nursing homes but are now "out," that would be different.
Because of significant early life abuse, I do not like or trust people in the raw. The only pleasant relationships I can have are through typewritten communications. Most of the folks in this home are either significantly demented or were never particularly intelligent to begin with. Talking with them is a dreary waste of time. I say "most" simply as a courtesy, the fact being that I have yet to meet one single co-resident (of about 170) who can (or is willing to) communicate with me in a reasonably interesting way.
We could all benefit from your experiences with life in an assisted living facility.
(a) It's definitely not an ALF. It's a nursing home. Not familiar with the difference?
No, it's probably my loose use of the term, considering I've never had a "pen pal" and only vaguely associated "pen pals" with "correspondents" or "people with whom one exchanges written messages," as we're doing right now. "Posting" is throwing messages into the void; name me another six-letter equivalent of "exchanging written messages."
