AGING PARENTS

dad is coming home today. so fucking thrilled. :)

been long overdue, no more half hour drives back and forth and worrying that the nurses would do something stupid again. plus, well, i've missed having him here.

HE'S HOME

Congrats!

all attempts at escalation for the Medicaid application bullshit paid the fuck off. I finally got in contact with someone there who explained what was 'missing' from the application, which could be easily rectified in the form of a simple letter.

I sent said letter, they have now confirmed the Medicaid side of the application is complete and approved, and now only Form 2515 from Senior Resource Alliance is required and we're done, and SRA just visited our house yesterday and said they would take care of that part.

Good stuff. Hopefully on the home stretch now.

in the interim, our process for taking care of dad is pretty smooth now, as I am doing 95% of everything, and mom changes dad on the bed (with me holding him in place).

but mom is once again resuming that thing she does of saying rude things to dad that make him feel self-conscious/bad. "oh, you stink - why do you still stink?". cos he can't fucking take a shower by himself, mom, we haven't cloth bathed him today, and also he just took a shit. and you were already getting worried about the fact that he hadn't gone in days - now you're annoyed that he did go? well maybe he holds it cos you make him feel terrible when you clean him up after. we've told her this, she makes promises, then relapses.

"ew, that's gross, Tony" when his nose runs, like he can control it. I told her today to quit making him feel bad and she barked at me like I was 15 again

it's going to stop being a polite reminder if it continues. this isn't like before - I'm doing almost everything now. dad doesn't move from one location to another without me physically moving him, and I get him out of and put him into bed. I'm not treating him that way. if anything, I've just been enjoying the fuck out of our time together after that nightmare he spent in assisted living.

anywho, he got a CT Scan today to look at how his C2 fracture is healing, so fingers crossed! :)

(I mean, these are all things I've said to her face, but the calm, Mr Van Driessen way I've been saying it may need to be a little more vinegar-y)

Whenever I’m trying to navigate some fucked-up maladministered bullshit, I think about people who don’t know how to use computers, or they don’t speak english, and i’m aghast.

My family recently moved near my mother-in-law because she lives alone and had a stroke with only mild after effects. But the right job opened up for my wife and it made sense to move and we knew she would eventually need more help. She has a neuro-psych evaluation soon so we’ll have a better sense of what is going on.

Neanderthal, you’re a saint. Your parents are very lucky.

Dad somehow fell out of his chair at the breakfast table. His balance has been off. Back to the hospital we go.

I'm relatively calm, it doesn't help to assume the worst.

He's ok and coming home.

Mom is trying my patience. I've had moments lately where I came close to screaming at her. The constant negativity and berating dad needs to stop or my dad's temper is going to come out of me.

It'd be one thing if I wasn't helping much but literally I'm the one doing all the physical labor with dad and making me anxious while I'm holding a 175 pound man isn't a good thing

Can you make a hard and fast rule with her, that when you say "stop talking now" she actually does it? When you're both calm and not physically dealing with your dad, tell her it's making things unsafe so you will mean it when you say it and she'll need to comply?

that's a good idea actually. thanks!

I hope it works and makes things a bit easier for you.

MEDICAID APPLICATION IS APPROVED, IT'S FINALLY DONE!!!!!! they just sent a letter to the Senior Resource Alliance confirming.

took way more effort than should have been, but I shook the right tree and got a personal contact and that made the process much easier. she singlehandedly fixed the errors the original processors made in denying us.

anyone in the US have a parent with a fall alert system and if so which did you use and do you like it? My mom is going through her latest round of chemo (she's terminal); I got to her house (I live out of state) last week and she looked like she'd been in a car crash; she fell in her kitchen and smashed her head into the stove top and didn't bother to tell me about it until I got there.

I can't help with the question but v sorry to hear about your mom. Good luck.

I've now talked to three other people about my age and been disturbed to find out how much of a trend it is for these elders to hide shit from their kids. falls, car accidents, strokes.

it's absolutely terrifying. many elders don't have the care they need, and they know that level of care would burden their children, so they hide it all. i'm sorry to hear about your mom. we haven't yet tried one of those fall alert systems but I wonder if quincie (summoning you!) knows!?

(also quincie I hope you are doing alright re: your recent health concerns as well)

I sensed the summon! And I am doing well, thank you. My boobs are now gone and hopefully all of the cancer has thus been evicted.

Re: fall alert systems. I do not have first-hand experience with a particular system, but I have referred clients to shopping guides for medical alert systems. IIRC (I am not at work so don’t have that info at my fingertips), Bay Alarm gets consistently good ratings. They may have a fall monitor option. Cameras are increasing popular. Safety check phone calls (which trigger calls to emergency contacts if not picked up) are another option. I think Apple watches offer a fall alert option. My ilx webmail doesn’t work but perhaps Neander could make an email connect to me if you’d like to be in touch off board.

Also if you mom is not already enrolled in hospice, I would strongly strongly recommend; that could get more nursing visits onboard to help with safety and patching up injuries without having to do the ER thing.

Actually Neanderthal I think a talk about hospice would not be premature for your dad. The repeated ER to hospital/rehab cycle is a red flag.

^ otm. when you are a caregiver in the midst of dealing with serial crises it is hard to free up the attention to recognize that red flag and even harder to process it, but hospice is an option worth considering.

We're starting to have discussions re: hospice for my mom now. Before we started talking, I was under the assumption that hospice was strictly for patients whose death was imminent, but I've learned that that's not the case -- as quincie says, it can help with more nurse/social worker visits in the short- and medium-term.

Re: fall alerts, a lot of assisted living/memory care places will have a facility-wide electronic system in place, and in my mom's case it's worked very well. Don't have experience with anything in-home.

For insurance coverage of hospice, the patient has a prognosis of six months were the disease to run its expected course. I’ve had clients in hospice for a year or more as they continued to outlive the best-guess prognosis. You can leave hospice at any time, it’s in no sense a one-way street. Sooner rather than later is absolutely my recommendation. Over and over, families say they wish they had known they could start long before “imminent.”

dad's neurologist said he could take off the neck brace now. victories.

we pretty much move him around instead of letting him walk on his own now to avoid fall risks and it's gone pretty well, having medical equipment if Medicaid pays for any will be nice, and the nursing care.

i'm going to be swole pretty soon, it's good exercise.

the other day, I said "what are you looking at" and he still said "not much", same as when I was growing up.

;)

got dad's Medicaid card in the mail and our caseworker paid a visit and set up an appointment for next Tuesday to talk about coordinating care.

I almost can't believe it's finally happening. relief!

That is fantastic news! Really hoping it makes positive differences in all your lives!

I knew this day would come. Because my mother's phone was off the hook for the last day I requested a welfare check. She's been contacted, but the officer who made the check is threatening to have the property condemned if my sister and I don't do something NOW.

:(

I'm sorry you have to deal with that persistent weight. have you all decided what you plan to do?

She's at my sister's now. Right now we're talking about starting to clean the place out, but I'll believe that when it actually happens.

Oh hello panic attacks; you've come around again. (Familiarity in this case has bred contempt.) Hoping that tomorrow I will see my mother and we will get constructive work done.

j.lu, sorry you are going through this. Wishing you the best - try to focus on maintaining yourself - you'll be in a much better space to help others.

think we've reached shit/fan time

my mom emailed me tonight saying that she wouldn't make thanksgiving because she didn't feel comfortable making the drive. (fair.) i replied that she needn't drive as four days ago i had discussed with her and purchased a train itinerary that was sent to every single email account of hers i'm aware of. and that if she couldn't remember that, it was a problem

then we spoke for 20 minutes on the phone while she searched for emails -- she did actually find the most recent one, but avoided mentioning that 'it was a problem' when she read it to me -- and again and again misconstrued the departure times. basically there's no way she makes that train trip without someone physically positioning her at each of the key points

i don't even know where she'll end up, but she can't stay in hordeopolis. and i guess i'll get to sort it

my aunt fell and hurt her arm last night and i can’t get her to just sit down and stop doing things

i insisted on doing the dishes. she is doing the dishes

i can understand why my cousins are so frustrated with and worried about her lol

My 79-year-old mother came for a visit a few weeks ago. I have to say she's doing great. She's happy in her life, very active, in some ways in better physical shape than she was, say, 10 years ago. I'm trying really hard to focus on how well she's doing and not on how little time she may have left. (I do take encouragement from the fact that her father was very hard to kill; despite abusing his body for decades, he made it to nearly 90.)

Back to ER we go with dad. Mostly precautionary - he's had a nasty bout of diarrhea for weeks that subsided but returned. We think it might be a blockage of stool, as when there's a mass of stool, sometimes a paradoxical bout of diarrhea occurs so the body can get feces out from behind the blockage.

It sucks but my current mood day = this is nothing.

Hope things are okay with yr dad!

thanks tabes. he's home. he's constipated but not enough to keep him there, they gave him a prescription for Glycolax and Augmentin for his UTI, and he's home. twice we've changed him only for him to shit his new diaper before we got him stood up (not his fault at all....poor guy).

things have been pretty smooth lately but now I have to deal w/ mom's frequent freakouts, no matter how much I offer to take off of her plate (nevermind my own blood pressure, which lately sits around 140/100, which I'm addressing w/ the doctor today).

hospital were a bunch of shitheads and I think we're done going to this one. I was there from 6:30 pm - 3:30 am with a little break in between, and he still hadn't been seen by a doc, patients spilling into hallways, only one doctor in the ER.

Yes, take care of yourself too, man! Hope you can find a good way to get yr BP into a more
manageable place, tho obviously you have a lot on yr plate and some of that stress might be out of yr control. Be gentle with yrself!

Reading this thread and steeling myself. My parents and in-laws are all between the ages of 74 and 78, all still living at their own homes etc (and heck my father-in-law is still working), but multiple signs of looming issues. My siblings and I talk about our parents a lot (I live farthest away, so I rely on them for updates), and we all know that a crisis point can come at any time but for now there's not much to do except wait to see what it is. I have so many friends with parents in various stages of decline and assisted living (and of course many whose parents have already died). So it's like, my wife and I feel lucky right now to still have all of our parents in moderately good health, but we know it's not a sustainable situation. We can't even really plan anything, because things could go so many different directions that there's no way to prepare except a general awareness that things will change.

xpost thanks tabes. I successfully got a new prescription today.

unfortunately we took dad back to the ER. dad's diarrhea has been like non-stop, like Old Faithful erupting, copious amounts. since they've confirmed he's impacted, clearly the diarrhea is his body's way of trying to get feces out around the stool, which means its bad. we can't do an enema easily in our house and that's probably what he needs.

we went to a better hospital though. waiting now.

Sorry to hear. I had a small bowel obstruction recently and it was...just ungodly painful

sorry to hear that, i can imagine. and dad in his limited capacity did indicate he's in some kind of pain.

once again they're trying to discharge him. I'm finding this very weird since in the past, when we had a similar scenario, he was admitted for a few days to treat that and his UTI, so I can only surmise they want to free up the bed.

mom, though, pushed back (and did a good job) and asked if they could keep him to observe, and wanted the doctor to talk to her, because the amount of diarrhea he's having is beyond anything we've ever seen w/ him before, and it's been happening for two weeks. i guess they want to push the medication angle but we couldn't even administer any before he started going ridiculous amounts again.

it also boils down to my mother is having freakouts every time he goes that much, and neither her nor I can clean him up by myself when he's like that (usually it takes two nurses to clean him up at most facilities). I can't listen to mom screaming/freaking out every time, esp when I'm working or leading a class, and it's a two person job, and my brother is about to be out of the country. so I'm hoping they just help us by keeping him a few days or sending him to a facility while he 'heals' so that we can get him back when his bowels are normal.

part of the problem is also no doctors really explaining well what's going on so that's why talking to them will help.