<p>Very interesting to find this thread. Last summer my 83 yr old mother was in and out of hospitals, near death from pneumonia, shingles, then rehab, and seemed to be really needing assisted living. While I was involved in the college hunt, I was also trying to find the best place for my mom. She’s very stubborn and refused to leave her home. Her goal at rehab was to get back home, climb up those stairs, and get back to her normal life. Well, she’s home, but it caused lots of arguments and family strife so that she could have her way. It’s hard for me not to resent her and all the changes in my life because she, as she put it “won the battle with her children.”. She continues to recover from all her summer illnesses slowly but surely. That’s great! But there’s something missing in our relationship now. She still depends on me for a lot of things (I’m the only child of 4 in town) but likes to think she can do everything herself.
All this has been very stressful while I’m trying to get my first kid to find a good affordable college. Definitely the sandwich generation here… But now I just think, this is life, this is a family, things aren’t always easy and fun. There’s always struggles in life.</p>
<p>My folks have one refrigerator that they purchased as well as two others outside that my brother’s friend gave them as well as a FULL size freezer. ALL of them are filled to the gills with leftovers! It’s like they see the space and just want to fill it up. They always want to take home leftover food from any event we attend and add it to the stuff in the refrigerator. From time to time, H & I go in and toss things that we gave them that we KNOW is way past the time it should have been tossed, but it’s a losing battle. They have had us over for dinner and served spoiled food that they had NO IDEA was spoiled–we had to tell them the food was rancid/“off.”</p>
<p>It’s scary, because we only see food going INTO the refrigerators and freezer and NOTHING comes out (unless we toss it). They are happy and proud that ALL of these are full, even tho it drives up their electric bill and there are only TWO of them in the house. They rarely even eat at home and most of the stuff in the fridge are their leftovers from dining out!</p>
<p>Wish my brother would STOP using my parents’ home as a dump, as neither he nor they can bear to part with things. The appliances the friend gives are not in great condition, which is why they’re being donated to begin with, so keeping food for prolonged periods of time in questionable appliances spells danger to me!</p>
<p>@Himom - Right there with you. My mother has two fridges and a reach-in deep freeze. The fridge and the freezer live in the garage and they are packed full of frozen food, ice cream, cheesecakes and other assorted crap she buys on QVC. She lives alone and is 91. I’m pretty sure she couldn’t eat all of that food, even if she wanted to, which she doesn’t. </p>
<p>She also has a stash of mayonnaise (at least a dozen huge jars), pickles, olives, ziplocs, 20 jugs of laundry soap and enough toilet paper and paper towels for the neighborhood. And she keeps on buying. </p>
<p>I feel for those of you with parents with “hoarding” and food issues…but the stories are amusing! (But not to you, I’m sure.)</p>
<p>My father seems to have ratcheted down a notch, healthwise. He went back in the hospital with A-fib, which they fixed a year ago with a med which has had side effects on his lungs and liver. Now there seems to be nothing they can do for any of these issues. He still has his faculties and is very angry at being dealt this hand–a body that is failing him and a future in a wheelchair because he is too weak and short of breath to walk. </p>
<p>He is 91 but that’s only a number. When your mind still feels young you don’t want to cash in your chips just yet. :(</p>
<p>mommusic, I feel for your dad, it is tough.</p>
<p>My mom had 3 freezers full of old meats and bread and 1/2 empty gallon ice cream containers. My husband hauled 600 lbs (dump in that town charges by the LB so when he took it, he knew how much) of stuff just from the freezers. it was not even hard to toss it. </p>
<p>My Dad’s wife seemed to have the opposite problem as she got more demented (cleaned out every cupboard and hounded my dad to throw away stuff constantly). their house echoed just before she really completely went insane. But it was always so much more calming to me to visit them with no clutter. I used to escape my mom’s messes and just relax at Dad’s. Now that Mom is in AL, I let her have clutter, if it makes her happy. they make sure there isn’t rotten food. I toss boxes when I go visit. I didn’t know about space making her anxious since I have the opposite feeling, clutter makes me anxious. I got her into AL, so now can let her be as happy as possible there, if stacks of magazines make her feel good, she can have (small) stacks of magazines (She steals them from the lobby, they periodically take them back while she accuses them of stealing, ah well).</p>
<p>I want to thank everyone for the suggestions concerning the adult diapers. I took your advice and purchased a box of Depends that feel like underwear. Last week I got mom alone in her bedroom and showed her a pair. She wouldn’t touch them. Kept saying “no”. Then she pulled up her nightgown to show me that she already had underwear on. I just put the Depends in her closet. They are there if/when she needs them - What I mean is if my Dad decides that she needs them.</p>
<p>countingdown I hope you were able to purchase a blood pressure cuff for your H that you can get accurate BP readings at home. Use the regular cuff for yourself. Interesting to see how your BP reads on the smaller and the larger cuff.</p>
<p>That is a more common problem than the one I had with the calibration issue - I asked a friend of mine that is a MD and she thought my problem was quite unusual but it was a manufacturing quality assurance thing. I was pleasantly surprised how my MD was able to solve at his office. My MD re-calibrated my cuff so that my BP reading was the same as with their cuff (within one point, good enough). Very relieved that H’s BP is now at good numbers, on right medication.</p>
<p>SOS, thanks! DH is seeing his doc pretty regularly, has gotten the BP meds tweaked and is no longer under instructions to check it daily, so I think things are OK there for the moment. My BP is 90/60 and does not vary much, even with exercise, thanks to all my heart meds. The larger cuff would fall off my arm these days. :)</p>
<p>I wondered about the variance in BP readings in various offices and at home. The last time I went to the doctor the nurse put the cuff right over my clothing (heavy sweater) and the BP reading was higher than usual. I put it down to “office anxiety” but I wonder if the reading was accurate.</p>
<p>I am going to Va. to visit my father early next week for a few days. He’s in skilled nursing until (we hope) he can return to assisted living. </p>
<p>Momannoyed, I suffer from “white coat syndrome.” Once when I was pregnant, they were concerned about my BP at an office visit. They had me lie down in a dark room for 10 minutes, and then my BP was back to normal. It’s a real thing for some people.</p>
<p>I really wonder about white coat syndrome & all the BP meds people are on. I have EXTREMELY low BP, but when I go got a checkup, I am ‘up’, I am trying to remember all my questions, I am engaged, my BP is in standard normal range, but normally it is freaky low. Once after surgery they were rushing to take me back into the OR as it was only 78/42, I pointed out that was normal, I was not bleeding out 
Anyway, if I, normally low, have a normal BO in the annual check up situation, what happens to normal people in the check up? They probably look high.</p>
<p>Scares me that dad gets stomach aches–I suspect bad food may be a culprit. The good thing is that they tend to eat out, so rarely eat any of the food in their fridges, but YIKES! Maybe we can gift them with a new fridge on the condition that they dump these other refrigerators (that we aren’t POSITIVE actually keep food at the correct temps anyway).</p>
<p>Really prefer to dine out with them, as no one is really sure how safe the food is that they have in their fridge. They have served spoiled food to us at least twice that we mentioned and dad sheepishly disposed of.</p>
<p>When we eat with them, H is careful to watch and mimic what dad eats. He has noticed that dad only eats food that tastes good and skips the rest. H does as well. Last night, I had started preparing dinner, so brought the lamb shanks I was cooking to their home when we joined them for dinner. It became the main course of dinner!</p>
<p>My mom understands she needs to move and she’s pretty much shot down every single place. She mentioned to one sister that she’s doing some soul searching and deciding if what she needs is assisted living. My other sister doesn’t believe they actually do anything for you. Mom is in a lot of chronic pain, between the osteoporosis, fibromyalgia, RA & gout she really even can hardly walk across the floor. She refuses anti-depressants. One of my niece’s friends works at an elder care place and she has mentioned that my mom seems a lot worse off health wise than many of her residents. </p>
<p>Could any of you speak to the benefits of assisted living?</p>
<p>I don’t have much time now and will write more tonight, eyeamom. But this is a huge benefit: The AL staff takes over the job of assessing and persuading. It’s no longer just the family watching her, and often a neutral third party has better luck with convincing them that they need to, say, try an anti-depressant. As someone said to me early on, “We will be the caregivers and you can go back to being the daughter.” </p>
<p>My father in law moved into an assisted living place and within one month they decided he needed a higher level of care and he had to be moved to another one. The first place was one of those retirement complexes where they have varied levels of care starting with retirement apartments and then assisted living spaces. We all thought the assisted living would be adequate but it was not. MIL ended up placing him in a single family home which is an assisted living place with 6 beds designed for more acute care. He is doing better there than he was at home although I’m not sure he couldn’t have received the same level of care in his own home with visiting nurses if MIL was willing. I’m not really clear on why she wasn’t willing - she went from leaving him home by himself all the time so she could pursue her own interests to putting him in assisted living with no in between stage. It’s sad really. But they never had a very good relationship to start with. </p>
<p>I guess that doesn’t answer your question - the care they provide is: personal care, meal prep, medication management, and companionship. He’s never left alone as he was before.</p>
<p>The hard part is she’s old, failing health and losing her filter, but she doesn’t want to be around old people. But at the same time she tells me so much how lonely she is because her little neighborhood is a young families who work and have their own things going on. Winter is really hard on her. She has never recovered from my father’s death. I don’t know the answer, but she also can’t be given any suggestions without her snapping at us. So now I’ve just stepped back and let her run the show. She loves being waited on and I think many days she doesn’t even get out of her pajamas, she even has friends over and doesn’t bother to change. I get that once in awhile, but I don’t think at any age that’s really healthy everyday. </p>
<p>eyemamom . The AL place my mom is in (small town) is the most expensive one there. It is really good for her. She is very forgetful, but can fool people (not as much anymore) into thinking she is fine. She still dresses and gets around great. She had the rotten food and just wasn’t eating. She has her own apartment, but restaurant - style meals (they say, truth is every one pretty much eats what is served). In the 15 months she has lived there … 3 on “independent side” and rest on AL side she has never figured out that her stove is not plugged in. The “pill pusher” girls talk to her kindly 4 times a day and she has her blood pressure taken every day. The assistance part is $900/mo. It also includes laundry (which she wont let them do) and housekeeping, which she sometimes does let them do and sometimes not.</p>
<p>I am out of town so it is a huge relief to me that she settled in pretty well. She has people to eat with and people she has known all her life able to stop in and see her. She gets her hair done (I pretty much told the on-site hair dresser book her every 2 weeks so she gets her hair washed that often. otherwise it went too long). She rides the bus to the store once a week. They have entertainment in, they have standing bus trips to the CCollege basketball game (she goes every time). The people keep her cash in an envelope and give her what she asks for. She is losing the understanding of what money or things are worth, but I don’t care if she buys 4 things of toothpaste (which she never uses). It is harmless now that she isn’t filling a 3 bedroom house with it. </p>
<p>The big thing is that there is a staff RN on duty during the day. At night, there is someone on-call and they can make the call to take her to the hospital or ER or a Dr. Appointment. Do they do a great job? well, sort of. She conned them into taking her to the hospital with heart attack symptoms. After 7 angiograms, I don’t believe there is much wrong with her heart, but she used to get me to fly up to see her in the hospital. Now I tell the Dr that I don’t think it is serious, and that she has a DNR in place so what is the point of the agressive tests. If I could get her off the long term heart meds I would. Day to day I think she is 100% happier there than she was at home, but it was a rough first six months or so. </p>
<p>eyeamom- I could write a book about how grateful I am that my parents moved to an elder care facility with comprehensive services. They started with assisted living- one that included a nurse available for medication dispensing and procurement, care when they had a respiratory or other infection, onsite blood drawing, diagnostics and primary care if you wanted. Many assisted living places require that patient’s manage their own meds, often with the help of family members. Some offer these services on a fee basis, depending upon what is needed. Some offer what is essentially resort living, with 3 meals a day, a room and activities, perhaps with enough staff around that something out of the ordinary might be noticed. While nursing homes seem to have more consistent service options (with the quality varying), the words Assisted Living are applied to diverse care options.
My mother, now deceased, was able to manage her serious illness largely from AL, with occasional times in skilled nursing rehab post-hospitalization. My father spent 7 years in AL and living in a skilled nursing memory care unit there. Wonderful to not have to literally re-search for a new place as needs changed. These options helped my elders (and me!) to navigate it all. A big fan of full option facilities here.</p>
<p>Good luck with all of it. </p>
<p>My in-laws have been in assisted living and my parents are independent living within a continuing care community. The differences are that assisted living was in one building, provided 3 meals a day instead of one, managed all the medications, and nursing staff available 24 hours.</p>