Putting parent in an assisted care facility

[Complete Turf Care]

Sorry to hear that so many of you have gone through this, or are going through it now. We're beginning to wonder if my dad will need some help in the future. He's been dealing with Dementia for a few years now and for the most part, seems to be doing OK. But then he gets an idea in his head that's completely wacky. My wife has PhD in nursing, so she goes to most of his appointments with him. He lies to his doctors. Then he lies to her, me and my mom about what the doctors told him. He is constantly sneaking around, looking for a way to trick us that he's not getting worse. Sadly, he's getting a lot worse. This past week, he has decided that he wants to drive again, so it's non stop issue of how he can get his license back. Worse part is when he has a tantrum about my wife being mean to him and lying about his care, or not knowing anything about what she is talking about. None of us want to hurt his feelings, but his anger comes out of nowhere and it's all from something he makes up from a lie or half truth that his invisible friend told him. He can't say where he gets his ideas, but we catch him talking to himself all the time, so we blame his invisible friend. He's never been violent, but he's never been this dishonest before either. Mostly I feel sorry for my mon in having to deal with him. Dad will be 87 next month. Mom is 80.

No one can understand dementia until you have to deal with it. My mom had it and she passed away in Feb. 2021.

I joined a dementia support group on Facebook and it helped me to understand it better and deal with it better. One thing that sometimes happens with dementia is they will lie about the ones who care for them the most. For example, if someone sees the patient rarely, they patient will tell them horrible things about those that care for them on a regular basis. This can be devastating to the regular caregiver.

Lucky for me, my mom never did this. In fact, she knew who I was until about 2 weeks before she passed. She did not know any of my 5 siblings way before that. But, also lucky for me, I was able to visit her much more often than my siblings were able to.

 

[EddieWalker]

Thanks. My dad does not remember his grand kids, and when his brother passed away earlier this year, he said that he was his only brother, but he had two other brothers that passed away several years ago. Mostly he snaps at my mom because he wants to go somewhere and he forgot to tell her until it's time to go. He has never been good at admitting a mistake, so he pouts and makes up excuses. My wife is the mean one. She knows his doctors, she knows what he's taking, and she has decades of experience dealing with patients that don't want to do what's best for them. My dad doesn't like being told what to do, or that he is wrong. For whatever reason, he tells me how mean she is and that she doesn't know what she is doing, or that she is lying about how sick he is. So far, it's worked out well to keep his doctors informed of his state of mind. Right after he tells me something wacky, I tell my wife and then we decide if it's something significant that his doctors need to hear about, or just his illness acting out.

Hiring help is very scary to us. They have the money to do this for a little while, but that means there will be less money left for my mom to live off of. It's a challenge to do what's right for both of them.

 

[Fuddy1952]

IMHO the best thing the elderly can do while they are of sound mind and before they need nursing care is estate planning putting everything they own: house, property, belongings, money, etc. in the name of a trusted sibling. That person also has POA.
That's not that easy since it must be 100% trustworthy sibling, younger family member, or friend. That way after 5 years (2.5 for Ca.) their property and finances are preserved.
The hardest part is 100% trustworthy. The elderly can go into assisted living under Medicaid.

 

[lman]

I'm thankful my Dad went the way he did a few years ago at 93. It was tough to stop him and he was still living on 40 acres. He had changed the blades on his mower a couple of months before he died. His heart was plugged up but he was still sharp as a tack and could tell you about my great grandfather and all all of my relatives. One day he said he was tired and sat down. He never got back up. We got him in bed and with help from hospice he was gone in two weeks.

 

[Snobdds]

We have my grandpa at a skilled nursing now. He had a stroke in January and has been in inpatient physical therapy for 100 days. He is not able to even get himself out of bed or even stand up. So he is totally dependent upon nurses 24/7. He doesn't want to live this way, but he has longevity genes. So we take it day by day and month to month.

I had no idea it could be so expensive. When someone is in that shape, you pay what ever they say. You basically back up the brinks truck to the door and unload with a pallet jack.

 

[gsganzer]

Ugh. I went to pick my mom up at 11:00am to bring her to our place for Mothers Day brunch. She was still in bed! Nobody had gotten her up! The first concern was her blood sugar, checked and she was 76, not low-low, but not a good number. I checked the log on her glucose meter and someone checked her BS at 10:22am and she was 74. I don't understand why they didn't get her up.

I got her up and got her a yogurt to address the low blood sugar and set out to talk to someone. The next issue, nobody was sure if she had been given her morning long-acting insulin. After a bunch of checking, we believe she was given it at 10:22am, when someone checked her blood sugar. I have her at my house now, so I'll keep watch of her BS today and return her to the facility this evening.

I talked with the facility director and expressed my grave concerns. She was shocked nobody had gotten her up. They had told me they get everyone up between 7:30- 8:00 for breakfast and wasn't sure what happened with my mom.. Quite frankly, I'm not getting a good vibe from any of the management folks at the facility. Excuses are starting to pile up and it's only been 4 days. Right now, I have 0% confidence in our current arrangement.

We're ramping up our efforts to go back to in-home care.

 

[Deere Dude]

My mother was in a nursing home a few years ago and some workers seemed inept at best. After my sister, who is retired and lives 7 miles away found out, she got a job there as a care taker. It was possible to keep up with mothers care and take the management to task easier for shortcomings.

It seemed to work because the help straightened out their routine. After mother passed a couple years ago my sister stayed on to help with others. Not a job I could handle.

 

[Complete Turf Care]

Ugh. I went to pick my mom up at 11:00am to bring her to our place for Mothers Day brunch. She was still in bed! Nobody had gotten her up! The first concern was her blood sugar, checked and she was 76, not low-low, but not a good number. I checked the log on her glucose meter and someone checked her BS at 10:22am and she was 74. I don't understand why they didn't get her up.

I got her up and got her a yogurt to address the low blood sugar and set out to talk to someone. The next issue, nobody was sure if she had been given her morning long-acting insulin. After a bunch of checking, we believe she was given it at 10:22am, when someone checked her blood sugar. I have her at my house now, so I'll keep watch of her BS today and return her to the facility this evening.

I talked with the facility director and expressed my grave concerns. She was shocked nobody had gotten her up. They had told me they get everyone up between 7:30- 8:00 for breakfast and wasn't sure what happened with my mom.. Quite frankly, I'm not getting a good vibe from any of the management folks at the facility. Excuses are starting to pile up and it's only been 4 days. Right now, I have 0% confidence in our current arrangement.

We're ramping up our efforts to go back to in-home care.

Get some cameras in her apartment asap!

 

[2manyrocks]

Something to be on guard about is some doctors who get a lot of business from a facility will prescribe meds to patients to make them easier to manage.

IMPO, I'd also be leery about a facility that didn't have mom patients up and going for Mother's Day because they ought to know this is a day when family will make the extra effort to be with their moms. They may not have gotten her up because they were understaffed for Mother's Day.

Even if you think you trust a facility, it is a good practice to pop in for unexpected visits to make sure adequate care is being given.

I have a friend who is a nursing home manager at a facility owned and run by a local government as a true non-profit. They operate with a completely different mindset than the other facility which is corporate owned and which has been bought, sold, leveraged, multiple times. The corporate facility seems, in my personal opinion, more concerned about minimizing expenses while collecting the most in patient revenues. The low-paid techs do practically all the patient care while the nurses sit in a bullpen writing up patient charts to show that they are giving adequate care. ie., they appear to me to be papering their files to defend against potential malpractice and neglect suits. The food on paper is one thing, but looks like it came out of 1 gallon institutional cans.

Dementia patients may not actually be lying in an intentional sense as much their sense of reality is messed up causing them to say things that are also messed up because of the disease.

 

[gsganzer]

We're moving my mom back home and increasing the at-home caregiver coverage to be 8am to 9pm. The caregiver will get her in bed each night and the other caregiver will get her up in the morning. I think having two completely independent caregivers will help with the level of care too.

Question for the TBN braintrust:
I currently have a BayAlarm Medical alert system, with a base unit, neck/wrist pendant and (2) wall panic buttons (mounted 12" off the floor in her bathroom and bedroom). I highly recommend it, for anyone in a similar circumstance.

What I'm looking for is maybe something like a baby monitor system and/or an intercom system that we could use at night while she's sleeping, to let us know if she tried to get out of bed, etc. The in-law apartment is a stand-alone building approximately 75' off the back of our house.

Does anyone have any experience with a monitoring system for these purposes?