AGING PARENTS

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.

boy do i hate having to be the responsible adult in the room

so sorry, Brad. it really isn’t fair.

Sorry, Brad, I know some of how that goes.
Got this today from Chuck Eddy---it's not private, as you'll see, so okay to post here, though it is a powerfully candid, concentrated account. He's mentioned some of it in the Voice and elsewhere, over the years, but even if you've read that, brace yourselves (no melodrama, "life and life only"):

New post on Eliminated for Reasons of Space

Peggy Eddy, 1931-2021
by Chuck Eddy
Fifty years ago this past September 22, Margaret Mae Eddy (né Richmond né Griffith) adopted me and my four siblings, aged 4 to 11 at the time. She would have been 40. My natural mom had died of ovarian cancer at 46 the previous June. Peggy, as most people called her, had been a nurse in the hospital where my "real" mom Elizabeth (also a nurse) died; it's where Peggy met my dad, who within a year she married. I've been told all my life (no idea if it's true) that Elizabeth somehow approved of the pairing, since she recognized Peggy was a great caregiver. Which was an important trait, since my dad died -- committed suicide -- two and a half years after the adoption, in February 1974. He was 43. I'm used to parents dying young. Old, not so much.

Peggy wasn't always a great stepmom. She was, in a lot of ways, it seems to me, psychologically abusive. Someday maybe I'll go into details; I finally, in this past year, confronted her about it. That was probably a good thing to do. But abuse or no, it's hard to know what would have become of my two brothers, two sisters and me if she hadn't shown up in our life. We had spent maybe a year and a half in a Catholic orphanage (St. Vincent/Sarah Fisher Home, Farmington, Michigan) when Elizabeth was dying and my dad thought he was incapable of taking care of us. We could easily have gone back there, or been split up from each other. (Even at Sarah Fisher, we were divided into different "cabins" based on age and gender.) Peggy is the main reason we stayed together. Think of that -- my dad hung himself and left her with five kids who weren't even hers. But she'd made a commitment, and she kept it. Stubbornly, which is the way she did pretty much everything. Trying to reconcile the saintliness of that act with the memory of whatever she did wrong in raising us (hey it's not like I've always been a perfect parent myself!) has kept me in therapy, on and off, for pretty much all of my adult life.

After high school -- well, after my first year in college at University of Detroit -- I got the hell out of Michigan, shut the door behind me, and almost never looked back. As life strategies go, that kind of compartmentalization has served me pretty well over the past six decades. Three of my siblings stayed in suburban Detroit. One of them stopped talking to Peggy a few -- maybe several -- years ago; I never knew specifically why, and never asked, even though Peggy asked me if I knew why pretty much whenever we talked, which wasn't that often but was often enough: on her birthday, Mother's Day, Christmas, a couple times when she was hospitalized a few months back. Even though she'd never met him, she almost always also asked about my wife's dad, who's in his 70s and has early onset dementia and is in assisted living here in Austin. She inevitably had advice about how we should or shouldn't be dealing with him. She was always full of unsolicited opinions about stuff like that. She could be a real know-it-all, a real pain in the ass.

Last time we talked was October 15, her 90th birthday. She was grumpy, and it didn't help that I probably asked a couple stupid questions about her medical treatment. Especially being so geographically detached -- unlike my youngest sister Emily and stepsister Nancy, who had to put up with her every day -- it was hard to keep all the medical issues straight. Her body had become increasingly frail over the past few years. As recently as this summer, though, her mind was sharp. She told me what she remembered about polio and smallpox. Fairly recently, she was still providing in-person care to elderly patients years younger than she was.

This morning, Emily called me. Peggy had died peacefully, on her couch, sometime after waking up. She had just, in the past day or two, come to terms with the realization that she was about to go into assisted living care herself. Now I have to figure out if I'm going to fly up for the funeral next week. I've been trying to sort out my mixed feelings all day. I don't even know if I'm comfortable flying now, what with omicron and all. I'm leaning toward going if Emily needs the support, if she says my being there would be helpful. But I've been to enough funerals, since I was little, to know that it will only depress me. I don't want to have to stand around shaking strangers' hands all day. Michigan December weather won't help; my fingers turn white and go numb with Raynaud's as soon as the temperature drops below 50ºF. On the other hand, maybe obviously, there's a good chance I'll feel guilty if I *don't* go. I already feel guilty for not swinging up to Michigan when I visited my daughter in Cleveland this summer. But none of these seem like legitimate reasons to go, or not to. Still trying to process all this. Maybe I should sleep on it.

Chuck Eddy | December 3, 2021 at 4:39 pm | Categories: Not Music | URL: https://wp.me/pcuz5h-1QM

I told him I thought he would be wise to sleep on it.

That is really well written, thanks.

mom's broken toe meant she opted to pass on visiting dad at the skilled nursing tonight so I went. told him she had a broken toe, and he got the familiar furrowed brow look that he used to get pre-stroke , asking me "broken toe?". and I put him on the phone with her and he managed to get more out than he usually does in terms of speech, asked her how she was doing and all.

it was sweet to see.

My Mother came in here, apparently she has a blood clot on her lung, the doctor warned her that she might be found dead in her bed tomorrow morning, I telt her haha no chance, it'll be a week at least til anyone finds you, now your cat is dead, she took that in good humour so I think she's mentally capable. Then she cadged cigarettes and left and now I'm like Holy Fuck, what if My Mother dies?

!!! really hoping your mother is ok, JMM!

my dad's still in skilled nursing. I sort of shattered a bit during that semi-traumatic post-Thanksgiving weekend. After I couldn't lift dad off of the floor after multiple attempts the day he fell I just sort of stared into space feeling defeated, and since then have felt like I've not been as helpful as I was prior, like there's part of me holding back because he's afraid of feeling those intense anxious feelings again.

I still visit dad frequently, and my brother has majorly stepped up (shockingly) and he's been around a lot. financially, he and I are still doing what we can to support Mom, and ....sometimes, it's a lot.

the skilled nursing thing is frustrating as we had planned to try and pull him out after 10 days and they told us last weekend they had to wait until Wednesday (today)'s discussion about his progress that the doctors do, only to then tell us they can't release him without a doctor's permission (?) so we might not have him back by Christmas. we're obviously going to fight hard against that because his physical therapist doesn't seem to think he needs to be there anymore, but now this is going to cost a fortune.

the money I raised via GoFundMe from all those amazing friends has paid for medical bills and will help cover the majority of his stay there (thank God), but we're going to have a pretty big overage and apparently the payment plan they told us about only goes for 6 months (which they neglected to tell us). looks like brother and I will have a fun monthly bill to enjoy soon.

I'm doing ok. in anticipation of dad coming back, we got a big bedside commode for dad to reduce the difficulty of bathroom visits, and a proper wheelchair that he could use to wheel himself.

i've gotten myself so wigged out by Omicron I'm debating masking in the house temporarily like I did when I lived w/ them last year. he's boosted but he's not perfect health, though not immunocompromised.

really hoping 2022 can take it easy on us cos we had a helluva 2021.

fingers crossed for you and yr dad and the fam!

Wishing you and your family the best Neanderthal.

O Hell Yes!

he's home tomorrow officially :)

I hope it adds measurably to yours and your family's enjoyment of the holiday.

it definitely will.

That's good news Neanderthal.

So glad your dad will be home with you for the holidays!

thanks all!

he's home...right as someone in his nursing facility got the VID. dad was tested today, negative (all of us tested negative too as a precaution), and we'll test him again in a few days.

thank god for the facility in walking distance, mom and I got our tests in 10 mins. can't find the at homes ANYWHERE

so glad he's home. he walked tot he toilet mostly on his own.

dad stopped singing along to songs he knew like two years ago. one of the things that made me the saddest.

my bro put on some Beatles tonight and he started singing along word for word (faintly but audible) for the first time since then.

;_;

i think it speaks more to just how obsessed he was with them because he doesn't do this with the Beach Boys, who he also loved, but...still.

<3

That's awesome. Think the xpost home tests are antigen? If so, apparently not as accurate (so I've heard in interviews w some experts, but others may disagree?) So yeah, good you're so close to center, even if you could find the home tests.

great news Neand (mostly) - especially glad to hear yr brother's getting more involved.

Haven’t been on ILX for a bit so just catching up. Glad your dad is home! Hit me up if you have medical bill/Medicare questions. Medicaid is usually retroactive so, if possible, try to stall parting with OOP payments because they could be picked up by the great state of Florida.

Oh I definitely will - great tip, thanks!

I don't want to fight in the War Room bring down the Aging Parents thread, but my visiting mother-in-law fell and fractured her hip on Thurday. They operated that night, but she will need something like six weeks of rehab once she gets out of the hospital. My mid-eighties amiable but short-term-memory-gone father-in-law is staying with us right now whilst we try to finish college applications for the girls. Meanwhile my sister and dad came over for a few hours yesterday although my dad was very reluctant to leave my extremely-advanced-dementia-suffering mom alone with her caregiver whilst she adjusts to her new meds. That is all, think I will head over to Meditation people roll call!, if not The Monkees: Classic or Dud? or moog power

yike James - that's a lot! sorry to hear about all of that, a lot to carry.

Thanks, especially coming from you.

Good luck, James, dealing with your range of Aging Parents issues.

Thank you.