Visit with Shirley. Kay was hungry.

The visit today was by being picked up by Colleen, Joe and Shirley.  They got in this afternoon and I went with them to get Kay to go out and eat.  I don't know if she had eaten early but when we got to the Old Country Buffet she ate like she had had nothing to eat.  I put my arm around her yesterday and felt her ribs and they seemed to be just skin and bones.  Like she felt when she was 16 years old and weighed 80 pounds.  I am really unhappy about this.  She ate well at the OCB I am sure she and the others at the facility just don't eat because of the kind of food they are  fed there.  It's a tasteless bland diet done, because for some reasons these institutions seem to cook food this way. I can understand that done here but where Kay is they should encourage them to eat.  Actually most of it is brought in by venders, bland and tasteless.  They do this salt free of course in spite Government survey a year or so ago of about 50,000 people that people on a low salt diet didn't live a day longer than those with normal salt intake. If you have ever been required to eat a bland diet you know how hard it is to want to eat like you do normally.  If you go to an institution where they care for the people with dementia you DO NOT  find any overweight people.  At least in the one where Kay is.  I'm guessing there are about 50 people there. I can not prove it, at least yet,  that not wanting to eat tasteless food is the reason everyone is the way they are. Not wanting to eat.   But I am going by the food I eat here at this place.  If they would cook food to make them  want to eat it at the dementia place the patients would not go around hungry all the time. . Every time I go Kay seems to be hungry.  I do not bring her food other than a little treat like a couple truffles and a graham cracker.   Sometimes a soda cracker.  It is the same company that owns both places so they get the food from the same vendors.  I have not paid particular attention to this up until today as  I just learned the other day that Kay had lost about 20 pounds since she went there to live.  The last time I knew her weight it was about 113 or 110 I don't remember for sure as things like I am talking about now I was not thinking about then.  But when she lived with me and she got weighted at the doctor  she weighed 110 to 113.  The reason I am bringing this up now is because if she eats when she is with me that means she is hungry. I am worried about her hurting and she can not tell me about it and I am also worried that she is also hungry.  She can not tell us about that.  Neither can the others at the facility and I am convinced that is the reason they are thin.  They are hungry and can not tell the caregivers there that they are  hungry. When I was a little kid about 6 or 7 in the depression I went to bed hungry.  I can tell you it is no fun to go to bed hungry. People over here at the other facility are not thin or underfed because they have the mental ability to eat in spite of the bland food.  The portions here are normally huge.  Much larger than needed for people who do not do a lot of exercising.   

 Friends and relatives who think the way I do about not wanting Kay to go hungry and want to talk to the people at the facility to put some heat on them, leave a comment, if you do not have my email address.  You could talk talk to them.  Perhaps there is another reason for people going hungry, losing weight, we don't know about.  It is most common for people with dementia to just stop eating and  die.  Kay is way before that but that is the way they do it. But while Kay is here I want her to be as comfortable as possible. That means not hungry.