A woman who suffered a brain bleed and found herself living in a nursing home at 38 said she had nowhere else to go.
Priscilla had just given birth to her second child when she had a bleed on the brain 11 days later.
She was then moved to another hospital and put in an induced coma.
Priscilla told Lunchtime Live her memories around the time are unclear.
"When I woke up from the coma after seven weeks I could not speak and I had no power on my left side. I was 38," she said.
"I remember the wires keeping me going, the suction - which was awful - the tubbing going up my nose that I used to pull out.
"The hardest thing was my daughter [who] was brought in to see me.
"She was only three years old and I can remember the screams of her - 'I don't want to see my mommy like that'.
"It was on the advice of a social worker that she be brought in to see me because they thought I was going to die".
Priscilla said her condition improved and she got her voice back.
'I cried and cried'
She said when she was discharged from hospital the National Rehabilitation Hospital (NRH) in Dún Laoghaire was her best option.
"The fact that I was in the NRH I could not put my foot to the floor because of the nerve pain," she said.
"That stopped me from getting better quicker and stopped me pushing myself to learn to walk again which was hard for me."
Priscilla said being paralysed on one side of her body meant she "couldn't pick up my kids and give them a hug".
After spending nine months in the NRH, Priscilla was put in a nursing home.
"I'd no one to look after me, I'd no home, I couldn't afford a home and I had to just go in to a nursing home on a trial basis for two weeks," she said.
"When that two weeks was up and I had to go back to rehab I cried and cried because I did not want to leave the nursing home - I liked my time at first."
'Not the appropriate setting'
Brain Injury Ireland Head of Service Operations Catherine Lacey told the show in most cases there are few alternatives.
"In many, many people's cases the nursing home is not the appropriate setting but it's in the absence of other options," she said.
"Often through under-resourced services there isn't enough services, there isn't enough resources.
"The HSE disability services don't have enough and so quite often what happens when somebody does have additional needs or they can't go back home and they need some additional supports or step-down [facility] there is no funding for that.
"Fair Deal becomes the only mechanism to access residential care and that's obviously then into a nursing home".
'People are left there'
Ms Lacey said there is a "systemic" issue around a lack of services and funding.
"It's a cross-government issue, everybody needs to be working together on the solution," she said.
"It's the Department of Housing, it's the whole thing together in order to create the right step-down.
"Those nine months in the National Rehabilitation Hospital what often happens is those gains are lost when someone moves into a nursing home.
"The intention sometimes is that that's going to be a short-term solution but inevitably if there's no reviewing the case - and there are no alternatives - people are left there".
Priscilla said she has since moved home with carers, having built her own home.
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