What I'd like to know about this...

Is why the hell was this guy still DRIVING??!!?? :wtf:

Missing Milwaukee Man Could Be Home Monday

POSTED: 10:01 am CST December 26, 2005

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MILWAUKEE -- A 77-year-old man suffering from memory loss could be reunited with his family Monday.

He had been missing since Thursday and was found nearly 100 miles away.

Lovell Smith went to a doctor's appointment on Milwaukee's south side last week and became disoriented trying to make it home.

http://www.themilwaukeechannel.com/news/5662454/detail.html

Over a decade ago I was rear-ended by an obviously disoriented senior in our beach community. No damage worth schreiing about, I was more concerned about him and insisted he give me the name and number of his closest relative in the area and insisted upon following him home to ensure he arrived safely. I called his son immediately upon arriving home and told him what happened. He was just SO UPSET. The family had been trying to wrest daddy's keys away for a year. I thought at the time, :wtf: JUST CONFISCATE HIS KEYS!

I didn't completely "get it" until my mother REFUSED to give her keys up. It was a NIGHTMARE. Fortunately my sister, through sleight of psychology managed it before Mom could do any damage...

In his case it was more a sudden degradation of eyesight (depth perception, etc.) than it was memory problems, but it was harder than Hell, and compounded by the fact that my grandmother never learned how to drive (which was fairly common in that generation apparently) and teaching her at that age wasn't likely. And of course Grandpa wasn't about to "take any goddamn bus" - though ironically enough they lived on what was the best bus line in town at the time, living a mile from the Evergreen State College.

So we trusted him to leave the car in the garage, but he couldn't do it. Only options were to take the car or watch him kill himself - and likely someone else.

I don't know if you can set a mandatory age at which people are "too old to drive", but when I see 90 year olds cruising around in those old boats they have been driving since the 1950's, it scares the Hell out of me. On the other hand, my dad's 74 and he's still driving fine as far as I can tell. And of course the last thing you want to do is piss off AARP for "discriminating against seniors". So where DO you draw that line?

If they show failing eyesight or mental problems (like Alzheimers), they fail.

after a certain age. My mother, at age 87, has decided to stop driving because taking the test was too stressful for her.

one evening when he was about 90, Senile Dementia really hit hard, and he tried to "go home" the way he had fourty years previous when he used to live off Crenshaw from the San Gabrial area, and became totally disoriented late at night. He was about 40 miles off track, and had apparently been driving for about 4 hours all over the county.

He ended up getting his car stuck on a median island around Van Nyss on one of the main streets that masquerade as a mini-highway in the Valley, and stayed in a nearby hotel overnight until the morning desk clerk was nice enough to surreptitiously call through the county phone book and track my Uncle down using last names instead of just calling the police. The same clerk also called a tow truck and had Pappy's car towed off the median and into the hotel parking lot so that it wouldn't be impounded.

Pappy was totally lost, scared, and too proud to ask for help. He started going downhill after that episode, and I don't think he ever forgave Uncle for taking his car away after that - or for putting him up basically rent free in a spare family house Uncle bought back in 1980 "for investment purposes".

Haele

when it took my grandfather's license away from him. I adored my grandfather but he was a menace on the road...drove too slowly, was overly cautious and caused problems that way. The last few years he drove, I wouldn't get in a car with him. It hurt him when he'd ask me to go and I'd refuse because he was driving.

But he could have killed himself and anybody in the car with him. Or worse, he could have killed somebody else and that would have killed him. It's a hard thing to do but necessary sometimes.