AGING PARENTS

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.

Oh quince. I'm sorry. Good looking out on the advocacy. <3

Thanks IO, he was 90 and perfectly happy to move on, absolutely hated hospitals so getting him out was a win.

Neanderthal (and anyone else), send me your zip and I can get you connected with free "help" (quality of said help varies tremendously) with Medicaid application.

Maybe I should offer a Zoom on Aging Parents 101? Anyway I have long thought about starting an ILX Pro Bono thread where people can offer up skillz, happy to contribute my strange little set.

I'm so sorry, quincie, but glad that you were able to get him out of the hospital and into a nice hospice unit.

my zip is 32792, and you can send to the email from earlier. thanks! I subbed an app but I guarantee they're going to have a bazillion follow-up questions and that I'll probably have to redo it.

plus side - i learned about every toilet adjustment/pee splash guard known to man today. i don't mind dad peeing on the floor so much, I mind mom screaming when he does it. I found 3 products that should help as I've spotted the 'problem'.

lol @ me being handy-man adjacent now.

i think a zoom 101 would be extremely useful & possibly help with the loneliness of dealing with aging parents esp for only children

co-sign

Oh yes I work with lots of onlys—that’s a special category for sure!

I would take that course, quincie.

also, sorry to hear, though glad he was able to come to rest in a more comfortable place.

esp for only children

*raises a paw*

Any advice on helping an elderly parent (in Montgomery County, MD) get an appointment for a COVID vaccination? My mother refuses to get Internet access. According to her the phone system for registration is useless and keeps referring callers to the web site. (When I did my preregistration in DC I had to enter a lot of personal information, and would prefer not to have to do this for my mother.)

If the stories I hear about Maryland are true, appointment slots drop at midnight and/or 6am, and if you don't grab one right then, you're SOL.

Does the county she lives in have an an Office for the Aging or something similar? Mine does and had a phone number to call for older people who had no internet access and needed help getting the vaccine.

Montgomery County Area Agency on Aging Information & Referral Helpline: 240-777-3000

^^^usually pretty helpful

This website is laughably designed, but I use it all the time to find Area Agencies on Aging. The Older Americans Act designates one for every area of the country: https://www.n4a.org/

Good to try, but the agencies vary widely in quantity and quality of the services they do or do not offer :(

My parents are not computer people and I used websites to see where vaccines were being delivered and got them on lots of waiting lists. Eventually one panned out. I put their phone numbers but my email address. This is in Texas, so things might be different where you are. I put them on about ten different lists at pharmacies and clinics.

So, I've posted elsewhere about my mom (age 69) and her recent diagnosis with brain cancer. She's at my sister's in Philly during the week getting her third of six weeks of 5x/week chemo and radiation, home on the weekends.

My dad (age 69) had prostate surgery Thursday and was supposed to be out the same day but got a pulmonary embolism and he is still in the hospital (and likely another week) with complications.

My wife and I are working remotely from their place over DSL internet, supposed to be caring for my Dad post-surgery, but right now caring for their 4 aging cats.

I was freaking out yesterday when I got bit by a tick and shit got intense with my dad. I think they now have treatment plan straightened out. But man the last 24 hours have been nuts.

Yikes. Sending absolute best. My dad had prostate surgery years back -- thankfully nowhere near as fraught a situation as your dad has but it still was a bit uneasy to go through. This, this is a whole other level I can't pretend to have faced.

Thank you, Ned. My parents are only 21 years older than me, have always seemed young, and were both in generally good health for their age. This has been an adjustment.

All the best to you and your folks PKBR, and to their respective care teams. I hope the next few weeks are easier all around.

My mom had to move directly to memory care in a different facility from where she had been living with very little notice. Fortunately my brother and sister were able to handle everything and it went fairly smoothly. It's evident now Mom is much further along in memory loss than any of us realized. She remembers nothing of her living situations from the past 6 years, isn't recognizing her collection of DVDs or figure out her TV, can't remember that she has been socializing with people every day. Speech and physical therapy are starting soon.

Step-mom is not wanting to consider not living in her house, is sure it's just a little memory glitch that caused her two broken wrists, is rampant on Facebook with random out of character sentimental memes and jigsaw puzzle apps. But cheerful and okay with not driving.

Mum doing pretty well with her L-dopa treatment, super happy with the specialist she is seeing for her Parkinsons

Thanks, Jaq. Best to you and your family dealing with your mom and step-mom's issues.

Wishing all ilxors strength and wisdom for the years ahead.

My sentiments exactly