It's the hopelessness of Alzheimers that gets to me. The nurses on the rehab wards - God only knows how they keep sane - work their damndest to bring the elderly impaired back to self-care and self-respect, but only a few weeks or months down the line, back the patient is again and you know that as soon as they went home, they have relapsed into self-neglect and confusion. It gets so it's a revolving door. Then there are the dump jobs - in and out like clockwork, with "constipation", "acopia"; I once saw "off legs" in someone's notes. They shouldn't be occupying acute hospital beds, but the reality is that the families just can't cope with an irrational, often aggressive, paranoid stranger who runs on a 24-hour clock with maybe the odd 10-minute doze. Who could cope with that? But we expect 80-year-old spouses to. Once the young and the middle-aged used to look after the old. Now the old look after each other, and the very old. People in their seventies coping with parents in their nineties.