Over a period of approximately 15 years, I had five elders in a nursing facility. The shortest stay was my neighbor Joe, who only lived about six weeks after breaking his hip in a fall. The longest stay was my dad. He had a shunt put in to relieve fluid trapped by scar tissue from a WWII brain injury. The shunt worked, so the operation was “medically successful,” but, likely because of all the scar tissue, he came out of the surgery a demented man (he’d just been getting a little fuzzy...