A 105 year old former Russian opera singer will soon be moving into a Toronto long-term care home after a 10-year wait.

Faina Mileikovskaia will be moving into a room at Baycrest’s Apotex Centre, a long-term care home 10 minutes from where she lives now.   Her family members are making plans to move her in sometime this week. 

She’s been living in a two-storey home in North York with three generations of her family.

Mileikovskaia,  who sang opera at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, is partially blind and deaf, and suffers from delirium and hallucinations.  She requires round-the-clock care.

Her family first applied to the Community Care Access Centre, the  CCAC with a preference for Baycrest 10 years ago.

Earlier this year, she was told it would be another 2 years before she could get a room.

By that time she would have been 107 years old.

After widespread publicity recently about her plight, a Russian speaking worker with the CCAC met with her and offered her a place at Baycrest.

Susan Eng, vice-president of advocacy at CARP, a new vision of aging, stresses the need for more readily available, culturally appropriate care.  Eng says media coverage is not the way to manage how people get into nursing homes.