My Thoughts on L.E.A.F

Earlier this year I had my grandfather die from a stroke, and during his last two or three weeks of life, the quality of his existence was solely dependent on those caring for him, meaning his family and the professional caretakers. Everyone’s issues with the professional caretakers were that they were quite impersonal, treating Grandpa as an object rather than human. They would come in his room once, and not make another appearance for another 18 hours. They talked on the phone and joked around. The latter is fine at the appropriate times; however play should have come after work, after they had already met Grandpa’s needs. There was not much anyone in the family could do about this, aside from complain to the doctors or try to supplement Grandpa’s lack of quality care with sentimental statements, telling him that we were there if he needed anything and sharing memories. Honestly though, this only went so far due to everyone’s conflicting schedules and conflicting views about how he should have been cared for. For instance, one of my aunts spoke with the doctor and banned anyone else in the family, besides herself or my grandma, from visiting Grandpa after a certain time. This meant that unless my aunt decided to stay the night, we were right back at square one, meaning that grandpa had no one to keep him company for long hours. Even during the day, when he had several people keep him company, certain family members caused strife arguing amongst themselves, debating what steps to take next regarding my grandpa’s health or blaming each other for his worsening condition. One person would walk into the room and say something like “Hey play this classical cd; it’ll stimulate his mind and calm him,” while ten minutes later, another relative would walk in and say “What are y’all doing? What’s wrong with y’all? Turn all that stuff off. He needs to rest.”

In spite of all these examples, I am not angry at anyone, because I understand that seeing a loved one in such a heavily-sedated state and not being able to truly help is a painful thing to deal with. Since everyone had to care for Grandpa’s needs on top of the everyday stressors of life, I imagine that they were all thinking on their feet, which led to the lack of coordination. All of that said, I love the inspiration behind “Love Effects a Future [sic].” I think this app is especially useful for people who do not have, do not trust, or cannot afford licensed, trained caretakers and thus rely on their own skills to care for loved ones.  LEAF would hopefully make family members’ responsibilities a bit less intimidating and a bit more manageable. My favorite feature on the app was the virtual medicine planner because with the physical ones, it can be hard to actually keep up and stay on track with certain medicines, or they can get lost or even placed into the wrong date and time due to, say, exhaustion from the person stocking the medicine.  The idea behind the app was quite sad, but very moving, so good job Wenting and Amy, if you guys ever read this.  Also the app itself was very sophisticated and I can tell a lot of thought and planning went into the feature of the app. My only criticism is that this should be less of a social media platform, because those already exist; besides, as we mentioned in class linking this to any social media would breach some sort of medical confidentiality codes, as these sites would ask for permission to view certain aspects of the app, which might include medicine.