Provincial Long-Term Care Challenge

"He went into the room of an old man, who told him to get out, and Mohamed pushed the man.

"'They said, we're arresting him,' and they put handcuffs on him, put a bag over his head and took him away.  It was really devastating.  The way they handled it was scary, the worst thing that's ever happened to us."  Laki Ali, mother of Mohamed Ahmed, 24, 6-4, 279 lb., mentally challenged.

Perhaps, in retrospect, not the worst thing that has ever happened to them.  Being abandoned by husband and father who returned from his diplomatic posting in Ottawa to Somalia to live on his own, leaving his family to fend for themselves, might have been the worst thing.  Or, when Mohamed Ahmed spent three months in the Innes Road detention centre after he was charged with assaulting his sister in 2010.

Where, according to Laki Ali, Mohamed's desperate mother, the inmates there beat her son.  And she is certain that the beating caused a stroke; in any event he had a stroke.  And then there was the time - one of many - when he became angry, chased his mother around her second-floor apartment, and she fell from the balcony while trying to escape Ahmed, in the process fracturing her pelvis, hip and left foot.

Ahmed's brothers and sisters want nothing to do with their brother.  They're getting on with their lives and they've no time to waste trying to cope with his temper tantrums.  Nor with anything else relating to him.  Ahmed requires assistance in bathing, getting dressed and eating.  He is developmentally delayed, seriously so.  He experiences seizures, has poor impulse control and when he's agitated, lashes out.

During his aggressive episodes he's more than a handful at 6'-4", weighing in at 279 pounds.  He is said to have the mental capacity of an 8-year-old.  An unruly, physically powerful 8-year-old, extremely difficult to reason with or control.  When he was admitted to The Ottawa Hospital for treatment of a medication reaction his mother refused to take him home, admitting she could no longer cope.

Trouble is, there are no open places for people requiring long-term care.  Ontario has no fewer than 11,000 people awaiting their turn for residential supports, and many appear to be in situations as difficult to cope with as Mohamed Ahmed's.  He remained in a private room at The Ottawa Hospital while social workers tried to find a place for him.  The hospital estimated it cost them $1,500 daily to provide for Ahmed.

He was unhappy at the hospital's neurological unit, and attempted on several occasions to run away.  The last time that happened his mother brought him back, and that's when he went into the room of an elderly man instead of his own room and took offense when the man ordered him away.  He was rough with the old man, and rough toward a police officer who appeared on the scene.  The Ottawa Hospital discharged him and won't entertain the possibility of re-admitting him.

"Either I took him home and put his safety and my safety at risk, or I let him go to the detention centre", said Mohamed Ahmed's mother Laki Ali, in despair.