IMAGINE being surrounded by death. Spending your days sitting in a quiet room and your nights listening to the shrieks of someone who is losing their mind.

Everyone around you is half a century older. At 4.30pm each day you are served a mushy dinner. You feel institutionalised. You feel decades older than you are.

It’s the story of more than 1000 young people across Australia today, the inconvenient generation who have been unceremoniously dumped in nursing homes because there is nowhere else for them to go. They are too sick to be at home, and not sick enough to take up a hospital bed.

Katy Skene was one of them. She spent 15 months in an aged care home at the age of 33.

“It was like the lights went out on my life. I lost my confidence. I lost the will to do anything,” she told news.com.au.

Katy had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at 19, but her symptoms were mild enough for her to finish her early childhood degree at the University of Melbourne and become a kindergarten teacher. It was only after she had worked in her dream job for ten years that doctors were forced to operate to remove her bladder.

After three months in hospital, she was too sick to go home but using up a bed. One day, a social worker came to tell her she was being put in an old people’s home.

“I froze,” she said. “I was s**t scared. They tried to make me feel grateful. My grandparents weren’t even in aged care.

“To me, that’s when life ended. I was going to be forgotten about.”

Just a few months earlier, Katy had been out clubbing every weekend and enjoying her teaching career. Now she found herself stuck in a grey, clinical world with people who spent their days playing bingo and having singalongs on the piano.

“The nurse pulled down the covers and said, ‘oh, we’ve got a pretty one here,’” she said. “I was devastated. The older people there saw me as a novelty.”

Infantilised and isolated aside from visits from her parents, Katy’s confidence ebbed away to the point where she barely left her room. She befriended Judy, one of the youngest people in the home at 60, and they would watch the footy together. They remained friends even after Katy got out, until Judy recently died.

“I had a shower every other day, sometimes bumped to the third day. If I wanted to wash my hair, it was a hassle.

“I would hear the piano from my room and it would make me cry, because that was all they did, or play bingo, old person stuff, which was great for them.

“I shared a room with a lady who had dementia, she’d cry out all the time in her own language.

“My family were wonderful. If not for them, I would have gone under. My mindset was so bad I felt like I was being punished.”

Katy had given up hope when a social worker told her a space had come up for her in supported housing. But at 34, she was so institutionalised she hardly knew what to do with her new-found independence in Williamstown, Victoria.

She had lost her friends, she didn’t go out and even the idea of having a choice of what to eat each day was confounding. It took some hard work with physical and occupational therapists and the youthful community she is now a part of for her to readjust to normal life.

It was her friend Jason who gently showed her how to go out for coffee, took her to football and helped her re-enter the real world. Now 40, she is “100 per cent” healthier than she ever was during her time in the nursing home, volunteers at a kindergarten one day a week and is an ambassador for the upcoming MS Walk and Fun Run in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. She and Jason have been a couple for the past 19 months.

“He opened the doors on my life,” she said. “Life is dramatically different. Whereas there I never when out, now I’m never home.”

Just talking about that terrible time makes Katy shudder, she told news.com.au. “I’m freezing on the inside, I’m cringing,” she said. “I don’t like talking about it but I will do it to raise awareness. It’s Australia’s dirty little secret.

“I look at my 33-year-old self and I just cry for her.”

TIM FERGUSON: HELP END THE HELL CAMPAIGN HELPS OTHER MS SUFFERERS OUT OF AGED CARE

Share your story with emma.reynolds@news.com.au or tweet @emmareyn.