AGING PARENTS

we're getting some temporary help in the form of physical, speech, and occupational therapists coming by the house, as well as a nurse to come help bathe dad.

his vitals still are just fine. his oxygen's great, blood pressure is the lowest in the entire family. he also still laughs at dirty jokes.

looked at cost of assisted living. holy fuck....i do well but not well enough to afford that. so this bandaid solution will do for a while.

still, glad to have this help for my mother!

Not really the right thread I know, but does anyone know the likely prognosis for a 72-year-old female who might test positive for Covid? It's not great, is it?

it depends on a lot of factors, but somebody over 70 getting it isn't inherently a death sentence (though it's definitely a much higher risk than someone younger). My close friend's father, who isn't quite that age but is *close* had it and recovered.

I can't seem to find it anymore but I seem to recall the mortality rate for people in the above 70 age range being something like 10-15%, which is high and not good, but does show that the majority still 'survive'. obviously a narrow way of looking at it, as a larger portion get hospitalized and might have long-term effects. but it does mean there's some hope.

it's a shitty thing to have to worry about and I hope that this person does not have COVID :(

Thank you Neanderthal. I'm attempting to not worry until I need to worry!

My stepmom, who lives in AZ and who I haven't been worrying about because she's younger (72) and active (teaches aerobics at her community center), had some kind of accident that ended up with two broken wrists this week. My half-brother also told us she has undergone a very rapid cognitive decline, so during her recovery there will be evaluation for WTF is going on there.

Hi Neanderthal, Home Health Care can be great; I was surprised at the options, and your father's Medicare Advantage or MediGap etc. may also help w hiring one part-time person w training, like even a "sitter," designated as such by nursing agency, turned out to be experienced as hell, and even a crucial source of incremental help, a couple of times, though also young enough to sit up all night, allowing me and my sis some much-needed sleep--even if you have to pay out-of-pocket for such a person, would so be worth it, for yourself and your Dad (can think better w more sleep duhhhh). This was just 2-3 times a week at most, but even one night a week made a difference. Something to to think about even if your brother does clean up his act a bit.

And of course that's more affordable than Assisted Living.

thanks dow. i've started to look into some of these options, just to give my mother a break. I'm handling the extra load fine but I'm realizing it's starting to wear me down a bit so it'll help us all out.

good news is we have some Home Health coming over for speech, physical therapy, and bathing. last time, they ended the benefits rather quick. this time we're going to fight to keep them coming longer.

you aren't kidding about Assited Living. I shit when I saw the costs.

in-home care can be a huge help if you can swing it! my father inlaw had a helper i think they got through his medicaid somehow
she was amazing.

my fil was first-generation native Hawaiian, and the helper they hired for him was a middle-aged Tongan woman. Because his memory had regressed so much, seeing another brown person put him back in happy childhood memories & he responded so well to her, and she was so good with him, making sure he ate & was clean (and she was huge & could lift him which was awesome).

she took care of him until he really started deteriorating & needed fulltime care.

But it was a major source of relief for my inlaws, that they could interact with him on their own terms, without the exhausting heavylift of bathing or bathrooming and all that goes with the carer-side of dementia . being able to remove *that* part of the emotional/physical stress was huge. puts such a huge strain on the household, and alleviating it can make a huge difference in your day to day coping/interactions

i think mom applied for Medicaid on dad's behalf and they didn't approve it cos of Florida's stingy standards or somethin but I am gonna get on her to do it again.

Dad fell again shortly after I posted earlier. probably the least severe of all of them, he went down softly on the floor up against the couch, but it's just exhausting thinking if one of us leaves the room for a minute (which is legitimately what happened) he might lose balance. i had no trouble getting him up (I'm getting swole now thanks to this), but i realize i'm tired as fuck at the moment.

and i also know deep down that my bro will never give much more than he is doing now because he just can't. he freezes because he freaks at seeing his parents being vulnerable. eventually the come to jesus talk is gonna have to come because well, fine, but, I cna't do it all myself.

but if dad gets on Medicaid and we can afford more help to give us a break......it'll be a relief.

It's ok tho. i'm still here, i just gotta....find my pockets. this is such a reversal from the nomadic "hey let's book a flight to Chicago this weekend, I'mbored" lifestyle I was living not that long ago. but that could never have endured much longer anyway.

some days I step in and take over with helping dad cos mom just gets impatient and yells at him.

like...is that going to make a stroke patient suddenly do what you want? lol

but she's also mentally exhausted from the last two or three years so I cut her some slack.

apparently we have a meeting to see what we qualify for ongoing....had home therapy again for the last two months and it's gone well.

we had a room in a hotel for my dad's birthday with a handicapped bathroom. dad still managed to fall...on top of my mother.

both are ok.

we're looking into adult day care, Medicare will barely help with shit, already want to discharge him for his physical therapy. they hear he falls and it's like "cool, heard of a wheelchair"....we have a shitty one, because the insurance company and provider were bickering, but the one we have works ok. but the bathroom is so damn small as we didn't look at it before we moved in.....so the wheelchair doesn't fit and he has to use his case the rest of the way to it. though honestly he's always been fine doing that.

ran out to Walgreens at midnight to get bandages and neosporin and of course somehow at 11 pm the 2 lines were long as the cashiers were moving slow as shit, I was gone for 20 minutes and i only went across the street.

I actively hate my life now. but my brother now has like few free nights a week due to a new acting gig so yeah good luck getting more help from him. i showed him how to take dad to the bathroom yesterday and you'd have thought he was going through the Ludivico technique.

wanna get through one week without sobbing into my hands

Sorry you're having to deal with this by yourself, Neanderthal.

i'm a wee better this morning as my bro showed up and is helping again and a few of my friends were able to calm me down. that's my mother and I really need is relief.

thinking about paying for occasional private home health care but gotta price search and figure out when would be best. adult day care seems like reality.

he's 73 today. here's to many more.

def pursue medicaid; its not cheap but worth it, likely, if you can get the resources together to have an elder care lawyer do the application for you if they assess he can qualify

my mom has been on medicaid for a few years now, she is 70 -- shes in an "independent" living facility (similar to assisted living) which has been working out p good but she fell 3 days ago going to the bathroom at 2am and fractured her hip. she had 3 screws put in yesterday. i visited her in the hospital today (only the second time i have physically seen her since march 2020), she really battles a lot of anxiety and depression that interplay w her physical issues in a bad way but i am somewhat hopeful the rehab process could be good for her

Hey Neanderthal does your ilx webmail work?

hi quincie - it does!

Mother-in-law had a stroke two weeks ago and my wife flew out to Savannah to help and get a sense of her condition. Turns out she is more or less okay. Doc says she doesn’t need someone with her constantly, in fact MIL seemed happy when wife left. She appreciated that she came out in the middle of a pandemic, liked the company, but i’m sure she was tired of someone monitoring her life. We live in Houston, so wife totally missed out on the snowy apocalypse.

Now wife is musing about us moving to Savannah to help her mom. Our kids are happy here and are in good schools. We have friends and work with benefits here. Her mom doesn’t need constant help. And when her mom does need help, I say she should come to us instead of us uprooting our lives. But she maintains that she will never move here, and I say that is her choice. I really don’t want to make the kids move and I REALLY don’t want to live in Savannah.

Mum diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Where do we go from here, I wonder.

Sorry to hear, MatthewK. Fwiw, I've known a few people with Parkinson's, and many have lived fulfilling if sometimes difficult lives as things have progressed. May it be so for your mum, too.

Thank you, that’s my hope too. She’s intellectually very active so I’m hoping that will be unaffected at least.

Both my mom (82) and my stepmom (72) were diagnosed with dementia last week. Stepmom is level 4 on FAST, mom is closer to level 5. So many family text threads going.

That's really rough, Jaq. Best to you all.

That’s very hard Jaq, I’m sorry.
The place I work has a free online course about dementia which explains what happens and how people and families are affected, it might be worth recommending to family. You can search up Wicking Understanding Dementia MOOC.

Thank you both! MatthewK, I will look that up - much appreciated. Mom is currently in skilled nursing for a bit due to an extreme hypertensive episode that probably made the memory loss much worse. Stepmom is back in her house, with home health visits and no car keys while everyone rallies to try to figure this all out.

very sorry to hear Matt K and Jaq

bumped this bc just saw my own 72-year-old parents for the first time in a long time and, you know, they are old. I was just sort of wondering what I should be doing to prepare for the fact that they are old. They have some retirement savings but not really enough, and a ton of equity in their house that they are relying on but no particular plan to sell it -- admittedly they are in an area that has appreciated a lot and is probably unlikely to crash due to schools and amenities, but I still worry about them relying on that. Like what happens if 2 years from now there is a market crash and their health deterioriates at the same time, necessitating some kind of home health aide or move to a home. Do I need to be preparing financially to help them if I have to? Get the guest room ready? Anything I can/should be doing to prepare?

have you asked them what they want

Ask them what they want and diplomatically try to address what financial planning they have done for the future ? Determine if they would want planning advice from you, or websites, or paid financial planners ( if $ is available to pay for the latter)?

Yeah, even gently asking never hurts. I'm very fortunate that my parents' situation is ridiculous stable all around especially for their age, and they remain very active, but further knowing their specific health-care plans and directives and general financial overview has meant even less worry.

looks like my dad might qualify for Medicaid after all. working on subbing an application so he can get a waiver in FL to use for home/adult day care. the application for Florida is terrible, teh questions are written stupidly, and the site is buggy, but I figure submitting it gets us through the door at least.

Like what happens if 2 years from now there is a market crash and their health deteriorates at the same time, necessitating some kind of home health aide or move to a home.

My parents have spent the last 2-3 years working on this house to prepare to sell it for as much $ as possible in order to "retire" (they're already retired but haven't noticeably slowed down) to a house that won't need any upkeep where they can live on one floor if nec. It has been an enormous job for them to deal with all the details--if your parents are prepared to tackle it on their own, it will save you ONE MILLION HOURS of stress. Plus, like...it's their life & choice, if they're still mentally astute?

But yeah they talked about doing it now specifically because they're still capable, and they want real estate & finances resolved before a health crisis forces them to do it in a rush & maybe not get the best outcomes.

and it's helpful if they can use the house to fund their future lifestyle. my parents lost their house due to foreclosure in 2008, and have rented ever since. one of my mother's doctors started getting on her, "you need to start settling affairs, putting money aside for assisting living. sell your house when you need to." my mom said "wtf are you talking about, we don't own a house....we can't afford assisted living". doctor just assumed everybody has assets at their disposal.

My god memory care is expensive. $4k-$8k/month depending on the level needed (in the Indianapolis area) not including meds/supplies.

yeah I feel like parents have not completely thought it through, but it's hard to say. They do purportedly have a financial planner but IDK who that is or how much they talk to them. They of course say they never want to be in a home and that they don't expect to move in with us. They also have an attitude of "we're prepared to sell our house if/when we need to." And they do have some ideas about places they could afford an apartment and would want to live. But again, like what if it happens to be a bad time to sell when they need to? And are they thinking about the full cost of a home health aide or other care? I assume Medicare provides for that at least to some extent, but IDK. They're in better shape than a lot of Americans so I don't want to freak out over it, but they don't have the "recommended" amounts for retirement savings either, especially if you exclude the home equity (which is the bulk of their "savings").

OTOH I feel like my conversations with them about this repeatedly dead end at some point, and I may just have to cross the bridge when I come to it.

I assume Medicare provides for that at least to some extent, but IDK.

they do, but boy will they try to give you as little as possible. when my dad first left the hospital, they sent an occupational therapist, speech, and physical therapist for about a month, as well as a nurse to bathe my dad, but they sometimes no-showed or cancelled late, and didn't come anywhere near enough. and they discharged all of them after a month, and my dad's disabled! they believe in 'train the trainer' approach, or at least did for us.

important to just stay on them/demand things - this year we realized dad was deteriorating and asked them to come back out and resumed a lot of the therapies that were discharged prematurely last year.

if they qualify for Medicaid, then there's more options - in my state at least, you can get vouchers for in-home care/adult day-care/assisted living which cover most of the cost.

hopefully of course none of that is necessary for them, or at least not for a while.

quincie will probably have more helpful hints on this (and thank you again btw quincie for what you sent me - we're using a lot of this information)

side note, my mom yelling at my father who had a stroke and clearly CAN'T do things the way he used to really frustrates me and I can tell he does better with me than her. having to keep asking her not to do it but she can't help herself.

as I typed that, she said "you don't give a shit" to him. :/

that sucks so much for all three of you

xp :/

OTOH I feel like my conversations with them about this repeatedly dead end at some point

would they be amenable to setting up a session purely to talk about this? like it or not, it's going to come up at some point and if they understand it's causing you worry if you haven't thoroughly talked through, would that make them more agreeable to actually finishing the discussion?

it's good that you're already thinking about it!

I do aging parents for a living, specifically helping adult children with aging parents, at the moment I am in transit to other coast to get my FIL out of ICU to inpatient hospice, will be back to thread and happy to share tips once shit is settled with FIL. There is a reason there are jobs like mine, stuff ain’t obvious.

best of luck with your FIL, quincie...and thank you again!

Ugh, Neanderthal, that sounds really hard. sending good feeling.

thinking about even 2 more months of this is enough for me to pull my hair out. even when COVID's over, I'm going to be afraid to go two inches from the house for ten minutes.

btw, I'm monopolizing this thread and I know it and I"m sorry so I'm unbookmarking for a bit because at this point it's what it is and I would rather let you all talk about your shit. i'm gonna keep working on the Medicaid application (yay the site is down for maintenance tonight!)

<3 to all caretakers

Welp down another aging parent.

Pleased with myself for aggressive advocacy to get FIL out of ICU to have peaceful, comfortable death in hospice.

Another advantage of hospice is that now my MIL will have regular follow up for bereavement support vs nothin' from hospital.