AGING PARENTS

Well deserved I am sure Neander, glad you had a bright spot this week!

ok so UTI seems to be dealt with but haven't sent him to rehab center yet because they did a CT scan of his pelvis to see why he was retaining urine and found a huge mass of dookie up in there, he was apparenlty majorly constipated (which mom suspected for a while, but he would never be honest/couldn't tell us due to his condition).

they think this is why he's retaining urine AND why his heart rate is up, they've been enemaing him all day.

I guess this is the last step before he comes home. I didn't get to see him today as mom told me the smell would make me sick, so that was disappointing, but I'll see him tomorrow.

brother hasn't seen him once. he's busy, I know, but he also does this thing when he becomes afraid to visit dad in the hospital, so I'm gonna have to be a hardass on him soon if he can't make 20 minutes.

he's still...here. ugh. still retaining urine after enema, heart rate is still high, so they think his medication that helps lower his blood pressure/heart rate caused his fall, but without it, his heart rate goes up a lot.

it's not like he's in danger or anything but we keep spinning wheels, while meanwhile he has a room available at rehab center that I'm sure won't be held forever.

and then one of my friends last night lays on me a guilt trip that I should be doing more to help my mother escalate things with the doctor (i.e. why haven't we talked to the urologist yet, we always seem to miss them). that didn't help, because now I think I'm doing too little but I'm here this morning and have been calling the nurse and trying to do things so mom doesn't have to come in and can work. but I also was here a lot this week despite working full time (I spent 16 hours of my work week working from here, only went home when I had classes to teach, and the one day where mom said not to come as he was getting an enema).

oh and btw this is a Jesus hospital :/

being discharged as we speak! to go to his rehab facility. excellent!

mom and I have had a good system of being present, which has been needed because his doctors seem to be the lead character in Memento and continually ask questions they've asked 30 times already or forget he can't talk and act puzzled when he doesn't launch into a monologue on command.

managed to work out of his hospital room while my friend had a meltdown and called me in mid-panic attack at the same time.

that sounds extremely stressful Neanderthal but getting out of hospital sounds like a real positive step, happy for you!

major positive step. one step closer to getting him back home! and getting strength back.

glad to hear he's out of hospital, Neanderthal.

thanks tabes! I visited him yesterday in the rehab facility. it's a little....well...chaotic, but he was watching TV (as usual) and apparently walking fine. looking forward to him being home soon, though it has given us a bit of a break as well and let professionals take care of him to an extent that exceeds our capability for the time being. but his chair is lonely so I want to see him sitting in it soon. thinking a week or two and he'll be back.

Excellent.

Dad comes home Monday!

he's home!

only bad thing - they sent home someone else's meds with him (in addition to his own). that's...pretty startling.

who do I report that to?

(I mean, we're calling the facility to alert them so they can pick up the meds, but I'm worried that they might do this again and want this addressed beyond just telling them)

Director of Nursing at the facility

Thank you!

Done btw

Dad fell this morning. Home less than 24 hours.

He's ok but...ugh

The fall cycle really sucks. I’m sorry :(

on the plus side, we hadn't yet tried the gait belt, which should make a big diff (we hadn't been using one previously. the shit I don't know, loooord...)

how easy is it to get a doctor's prescription for a hospital bed?

I'm tempted to offer to give them my bed as it's lower.

The script is easy; it’s getting Medicate to pay for it that is virtually impossible unless he is bed bound, requires head elevated a minimum of 30 degrees, and has pressure sores.

*Medicare

Tho to be fair you live in the capital of Medicare fraud, so maybe your chances are better than average

lol. i think a better idea is for me to offer my bed to them, as it's lower. theirs is a bit high and it's on a box spring which isn't the type that they recommend removing. mine is much lower and it's a shorter walk to my bedroom.

mom is thinking about it. my bed's new and comfy and built for 2.

Do you have home PT/OT coming? This is the perfect sort of thing for them to advise on

both - in the past the OT talked about their concerns re: the bed height but their suggestio nwas "take out the box spring" which we can't cos it's not the wrong type of bed to do that. but we never gave the idea of switching beds.

waiting to hear from them when they're coming, one of them was supposed to be here today.

good idea for asking them!

another day, another fall. more like a slip this time, out of bed.

this is just ridiculous. I had to go to a follow-up appointment for my vaccine study, I was only gone 90 minutes. what, I can't even leave the house now without this happening?

mom doesn't seem to be able to keep him steady, and didn't use the gait belt this morning (why have it if we don't use it?).

he's complaining of dizziness. so when the therapist comes today we're going to have to talk to her and figure out what to do.

we can't live like this. and dad says his knee hurts now.

we're getting a new industrial wheelchair, I've suggested to mom using the old one we have in the house until then. she doesn't seem to want to as she thinks he'll get used to it and never walk again but honestly what's the alternative?

I feel for you, Neanderthal. I've seen your situation in my own family, where new problems emerge faster than you can address them, and the latest solutions that you so arduously put in place are outmoded almost as soon as you've: a) bought the equipment or b) changed the meds or c) hired the home aide or d)... whatever it was that was supposed to 'fix it'. You get on a treadmill of minor crises that seems to be accelerating. At some point you can strike the word 'minor'.

All I can say is you're being a fabulous caregiver and if there's any way you can shuffle some of your burden onto family, friends or neighbors, it's worth thinking about. You aren't superman and trying to be will eventually imperil your ability to do be of any help at all. Don't break yourself!

really I need my brother to step up and I've treated him with kid gloves on the subject and I have to be blunt. we've had a good relationship for years and I guess part of me is afraid of splintering that but he's basically living his life unimpeded while the rest of his family is making sacrifices. I don't believe everybody is inherently capable of this type of support but if dude gave up even like 10% of his social engagements it'd be a bigger help and he just won't. yeah, he's busy, but I had to turn things down outright.

*venting*. I've always been an introvert and I grew more extrovert tendencies after I got on Effexor, which made me a more social animal ,but that side of me is almost gone now. I'm too exhausted to deal with other people.

that's a really nice post Aimless and as it happens I totally agree with it. I really feel for your situation too Neanderthal. I love very far from my folks but this sort of thing is going to start happening soon and my sis does not have a great track record with helping out on this sort of thing. So I have some thinking to do.

Agree ty for that post Aimless

ty, but this isn't about me. I'm an orphan now.

Money does not solve all of the aging parents problems, but damn it sure helps with options. In the absence of anything resembling a care system i.e. the USofA

Like, my dad had 10 years of decline before dying from Alzheimer’s, but my family situation was completely different because $$$

Ne, maybe ask Home Health about bedrails? I ordered a couple of set, w/o dealing w HH or Medicare, because couldn't wait---but, after merely rolling a little too far sometimes in her sleep, or slipping, as you mentioned, then (don't know if your father ever gets this restless, but neither did she before this) my mother went in hospital and tried to climb over those professional rails at least a couple times, ditto hospital bed during home hospice---the ones i ordered were never used, but very popular, with mostly good customer reviews:https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005EHNL3M/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
And these, the regular size:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0070WGV9K/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1
There are others, of course.

thanks dow.

fortunately, there are still house calls made! apparently....our skilled nursing gave us a brochure for at-home health care for minor issues and we used it today, and thank god. they came and examined my dad's knee, noted it was swollen, wrote an RX for x-ray, gave him injections, said he can do a little walking but to limit it for now, and the x-ray will be done *at our house*.

godsend. all that for a $35 co-pay.

don't get me wrong, senior care in FL sucks balls, but that was the only good thing that happened today. it was my folks anniversary. 49 years. it was pretty much ruined. mom has been in tears most of the day.

Sorry about the anniversary sad, but YAY for scoring a house calls practice! That is HUGE and will come in handy big time.

Seriously. We couldn't have handled an urgent care wait today. This was eaaasy

Strength to you, Neandi, and if your brother really will blow up or cut you out for asking him to do 10% more than nothing, maybe better to get that over with than keep having it hang ominously in yr future.

Is there something *very specific* that you can ask him to do on a weekly basis? Some people need a discrete assignment spelled out for them when a general “hey can you maybe step up and help here” doesn’t work. Plus it makes them look like a total dick if they say no or fail to execute. Shaming for the win!

yeah that's what i'm planning to do - "can you come over this week to help mom take him to appointment" etc etc

thanks!

My mom will be relocating to be closer to me in the next year or two; my brother lives out of state, but he is soooooooo manipulable (is that a word?) via guilting and I WILL be making use of this on the regular.

sooooooooooooooo, lots happened. anyway, last night, the friend I mentioned on the cancer thread was in town one last night, with his girlfriend, and especially due to his recent bad news, I wanted to see him before he left. I had maybe a 3 hour window as dad's usual bedtime is 10, and I didn't want mom by herself for that. also, friend's Jeep had a battery that wouldn't start, so I offered to jump his car.

I'd only just finished work, and mom was out doing errands, so when she got back, she told me I should go meet my friend, but that she did have to go to the laundromat across the street for a bit (our dryer only semi-dries lately, sigh....). this meant dad would be unsupervised for a short while.

he was seated in his recliner, so against my better judgment, I said "ok", as we've done this before mostly without issue. However, on occasion, he's tried to get out of his chair. Usually, it's because he wants to change the channel and doesn't have the remote - he'll try to get up to get it and will slide on his butt. so I gave him both remotes so he wouldn't do that (which is my usual move), and told him mom would be home soon and not to move (he understands conversation very well, and he agreed).

I get to the friend's and am in the process of jumping the car when mom texts me that she got home and found dad on the floor. We don't know what he was trying to do, but mom said his ice pack for his knee was on the floor, and also she didn't see the remotes on the arm chair. We think he either knocked the remotes off the arm chair or dropped his ice pack and tried to pick it up. I told mom to call 911 as I was 45 minutes away, and they got there in like 5-10 minutes and picked him up without issue, he's fine, not hurt. but of course, I was flipping out and then i slowly calmed down.

Today, the plan was to relax. I had plans with another friend in the morning. Well....first of all, I had agreed to housesit for my friend on the 21st and 22nd. Well, apparently he meant 20th-22nd, and didn't realize he gave me the wrong dates, so he messages me after he and his wife and kids have already left the house to go to an out of town resort, and tells me they've left and all is ready for me to come by. Was pretty aggravated about this but I wasn't about to punish his animals for it, and it's not a terribly difficult or time consuming thing, so whatever, I pencilled that in in my head and said I would talk to him later about his 'mistake'.

so then I go to get dad up, and find this bump on his chest, resembling that of a hernia (which he actually does have). he says it doesn't hurt, but we hadn't seen it the night before, and it was concerning. we were worried it might have happened during fall. so reluctantly we got ready to take him to get it checked out, meaning I had to cancel on my second friend in two days, and mom and I had to give up a huge chunk of the day we'd planned to use to relax. we figured we'd just have them do his x-ray since the group that was supposed to come by to do it at our house still hadn't come by.

we were both stressing and very exhausted, and mom called my brother to ask if he could come by, because both her and I were mentally exhausted, we were going to have to load dad into a car with a bum knee (which we hadn't done before), and we could use the help. He was working, and she asked if he could take off just once to help (since he about never leaves work for anything). he messaged me to try and weasel out of it and I just bluntly said "I ain't gonna tell you what to do, and I ain't telling you to get fired from yur job, but mom and I are on our last legs here" and proceeded to tell him that we've given up a LOT, that I've had to cancel all of my plans for the weekend, and that I've had to take off of work in the past too.

motherfucker shocks me by agreeing to leave early and he showed up and was actually a huge help. we tried going to multiple urgent cares with X-rays but got turned away for a variety of reasons (one said he needed to be able to stand on his own and that their facility was smaller than a hospitals so we couldn't come back with him to help him stand). so we wound up going to the ER, the bump on his chest the doctors didn't find to be a concern (they felt it was small, and just related to his hernia but not a pressing issue according to them). x-ray showed no breaks, and dad seems to be able to put more weight on it, as we learned while loading him into the car.

but my brother took over and would not let mom do anything (to give her a break), and I also got a bit of a break, and it helped a ton.

it's too early to say he's turned a corner but this is the first real time he's really sacrificed anything. and obviously we don't want him leaving work often, it's just that today, we were too tired to go it alone.

(I did also manage to walk the dog twice and feed the fucker in the midst of all this).

let's just say I'm watching football tomorrow and little else.

(xray was for his knee, and the friend who I was housesitting for is diff than the friend who I had to cancel plans with. my whole post was sloppy, sorry)

my folks are now both 77, which must be an ILX approved age. Doing pretty good aside from my mum’s late onset, slow progression Parkinson’s which is totally managed by medication for now.

My mom is in her early 90's and is in assisted living. She's well-cared for, and has something of a social network there. (She has dementia, as do the other residents.) When I visit or call we have fine, upbeat, normal conversations, but at some point she will refer to a recent visit she had from a friend or relative who has been dead for years. She has essentially outlived her friends and family, but has brought them all back. Every so often she will say she's feeling down, because she heard that so-and-so (again, long deceased) has recently passed away. I find it interesting, this conjuring back the dead only to kill them off again and again. Not that she's doing it intentionally, I think it's just a subconscious attempt to make sense of an increasingly confusing situation.

I think My Mother is losing it mentally, she is 70 and just generally confused. She lives Down The Road and has other children but all lontano. So I fix her internet for her, but she phones up the social work and rants on my behalf, I have an assistant but she's... non-confrontional like. So I guess my mother will die in the next year or so and I don't know what the fuck to do, I can't use the phone. My father occasionally sends me football shirts from Korea but is otherwise not to be relied on, my siblings live far away and have babies and such to deal with, I'm just scared what's going to happen to me shortly. Social Worker hates me for spurious reasons, I have a cat and a fridge and am acting as an adult but eeeeeeh... Imma be put in some home when my mother dies and that's gunna be soon

my mom died a year ago and this morning i dreamt she’d finally come back, we were getting ready to go out together and i was so relieved and happy and excited. i heard her walking into the room but then my guy spoke to me, it was actually him walking in irl and i woke up and remembered she was dead and it felt like i’d been kicked. (it’s okay tho, i’m okay, her death was okay, it all just keeps being strange)

My mother just came up to mines to watch the football... there is no football on today. Then she started rambling about milk bottles, I don't know what the fuck is going on in her head

aw dude, i’m sorry. my mom was pretty scattered for the last few years, i found it best to just roll with it in a laid-back way even though it was scary to see her unmooring like that.