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Patients' age and condition: How old and how grave.
When the pull on you gets to be distressing, when your own life is at risk or endangered.....Some would not even wait this long.
When you can no longer lift her, change her frequently, bathe her, feed her appropriately, or walk her.
The time has come. All of us must realize this. It very well may happen to us someday. I, myself, would not want to burden an adult child with my care.
Good Luck and God Bless you both.
I have been in your shoes, twice. When my dad had his stroke over 20 years ago, we needed nursing home care, because his physical needs were pretty intense. At that time, I did not know how to find a good nursing home.
I learned a lot from this journey, and when I returned to the workforce, as a social worker, I chose the nursing home setting.
Years later, my mom developed dementia, and I had her in the adult day program at the place where I worked. She lived in an apartment building independently, but with my supervision. One day, she decided to go to the place on her own, and was using her walker in the street, as there were no sidewalks. Placement, followed immediately.
I can tell you that my feelings were different with each placement. Number one, I knew that the quality of care where I worked was sooo different from where I had my dad. With that being said, I still visit frequently. Although I no longer work there, I do visit frequently.
I can tell you what I think helps to make a good nursing home.
Number one, do they use their own staff-vs temporary help. This is of great importance since they become faces that your parent will recognize. That staff person can also know some of your parent's behaviors....very important.
Also, are there "stale" or "covered up" odors....that can mean that they are not toileting their residents quickly enough!
I forgot to mention something else....go to www.medicare.gov. This is a website that will give you the results of any nursing home survey in the country. The one deficiency rating that gives me a red flag, is decubidus, bed sores, skin breakdown. If you are considering a facility with such a ding, ask about it......
OK..nuff said...hope that helps
I struggled with the decision for a long time, but decided it was best for her situation. She needed to be watched 24 hours a day.
I cried all the way to the facility taking her, and cried all the way home. But after dealing with professionals, they have made me understand that most of the time, the caregiver has more difficulty with all of it than the parent.
At this moment, my mother is now in the hospital...I now wonder if I would have seen what was going on like the people at the facility did.
I feel your pain...like someone else said, take it in baby steps.
We are checking into foster care homes in our area. There are some really good ones and they only have 2-4 residents and they do all stages of care. They are checked out by the state, etc. My dad has no dementia, but needs help with all aspects of care, always kind and grateful which makes this move very hard. Foster care homes are also cheaper than nursing homes. We found our list of homes by calling the Dept of Housing and Services.
Hope this may help you also. coolbuss
I'm still wrestling with the decision and know it is coming soon. Hard thing to do but Bobbie is so right on target. Thank you Bobbie.
Good luck to you
Nina
If there truly is no other way, give it a chance. You could be pleasantly surprised.
Here's how you come to grips with putting your mother in a nursing home.
You realize that it is her or you. Either she is going to kill you with the stress of caregiving or your survival instinct is going to kick in and you are going to save your own life.
There are many fine facilities and great professional caregivers and more and more are coming into the market every day. It is so hard for a child to become the nurse and the parent to become the patient. We are not wired for this and if we were, we would have entered the nursing field a long time ago.
It's a process and you begin by checking out the ads on this site. Click through and start the process before it kills you.
I used A Place for Mom and they were great.
OK, baby steps. go to some of the websites and check them out. Fill out the little online forms and they will email you with choices near you. Visit them alone and pick one that you would like and that has a small ration of caregivers to patients. They will help you start the process and help with ins and whatever the state and fed govt can offer.
They are good and you start this before you are too beatup to get it started.
Screw Guilt. We all know that you love your mom more than anything or you wouldn't have been such a great daughter to care for her in the first place.
Now it is time for you to pass the job onto the professionals and save your own life.
you keep coming back to the site and reaching out and we will be here. if you want some crazy fun, go on over to the Grossed Out site and there you will find a big group of caregivers who post just about every day and we use humor to get though the day.
I'm sure that at this point nothing looks anywhere near funny, but give us a try. When you click on the link for the thread, go to 'last' because there's over 14K posts.
Read along, or just jump in. We love new crewmembers and you can get a lot of support from many voices....
ok, hope to see you over there and you can do this. We'll help you just like the caregivers on the Grossed Out thread helped me.....
lovbob