Medical backup non-existent

We have a friend here, English, and living on his own. He is now suffering badly from dementia, and is causing enormous problems for all and sundry. I am forced to unplug my phones before going to bed, since for him the time doesn't exist. He can't remember anything, phones day and night for help. has upset the whole hamlet where he lives and knocks on their doors without thinking. His driving is appalling, he's had nine accidents this year - nothing severe you understand, but his gates and garage keep jumping out at him, he has hit the pompier's van and a scooter and goodness knows what else. He has to take a medical now to ascertain his fitness for driving having had his situation finally reported to the prefecture by the gendarmes, has failed on his sight, has got new glasses to see if that will help but refuses to wear them "since I know the road". I tested him and he can't read a number plate at 6 yds. Yet despite our protestations to his doctor, to the conseil general, to the gendarmerie, no one, but no one, will take him into care. He continues to drive for the moment but has another medical coming up now he has his new glasses. He drives on the wrong side of the road at times, going back to his youth I guess.

I have tried everything I know to get some kind of social services help but it just doesn't exist. If you want meals on wheels, have it, and pay. If you need a nurse to visit, have it, and pay, but if you are frankly incapable of looking after yourself they just shrug their shoulders. There seems to be no safety net at all.

Aid is available but has to be applied for (in French of course!). A quick google threw up the CLIC and any local CCAS. Acronym city of course.

Does he have any family back in the UK? They should maybe be made aware of the state he's in.

A month on and we have not got far. The conseil general just wave their hands in the air, and we do ay least have an appointment for him at the Préfecture in January. He spent five minutes yesterday trying to open a Velsatis when his car is a Mondeo and drove off across the pavement between the handicapped sign and the concrete flower pot, scraping the only intact panels left on his car.

We are in the Sarthe, but we are now counting down the days until he no longer has his licence, and that will be in 18 days. He doesn't know the truth and thinks he is going for a medical, and keeps going to the opticians asking for "glasses that go further" although he's only had his new ones a month. He goes virtually daily forgetting he has been the day before. He can't read a number plate at six yds, and doesn't even wear the new glasses because "he knows the road by heart".

I could write a book about the onset and progression of this senile dementia, and it is terrible to watch a friend fade away. Still, he seems to have got some things sorted; he says he was at the doctors at 2.30am and in the bar at 3am!.

Update time. The state have washed their hands of him it seems so we have gone it alone. Last weekend he crowned his antics by driving his car into some barriers while parking and having to have someone else drive it out because he couldn't do it himself. He then went home and, having left the garage doors open, drove his car in out of the rain. Except he went in at an angle, scraped the off-side, and then drove straight into his new garden tractor ripping off the front axle and wheel as well as damaging the bodywork. But we were counting down the days since his appointment at the Préfecture was Thursday morning and all had been arranged for him to go into a nursing home Sunday. Except it wasn't to be. He phoned the ambulance Wednesday because of a bad back and his appointment was thus cancelled. The nursing home demanded a guarantor, but not one of his children was prepared, given the rules over here, to sign it. Did any of you know by the way (it's already happened to SWMBO's son-in-law) that if someone goes into a nursing home the responsibility for the fees goes down two generations? He ended up paying for a Grandparent he had never even met.

So we are now in a situation where not one of the family want to know him any more (he was never there for his kids anyway) so he's going to end up in his house with no transport and all on his own. And his house is in a hamlet six miles from the nearest shop. Well, he will be on his own if he doesn't kill himself or someone else first, given his driving, before the next appointment at the Préfecture anyway.