Glad to hear the good news! Wishing you well on the road ahead. Please continue to update us.
Thank you for sharing this heck of a good turn!! Keep us posted.
I am happy she agreed to the surgery. Expect a change of heart the day before. Hold to your guns, tell her it’s scheduled and cannot be changed. Expect tears and admonitions. I agree with the after surgery rehab center. They will keep her down, off that foot and you can have a break from daily care. Goodluck.
Hugs to both of you, and thanks for the update.
E-e-eyeah, the medical definition of ‘urgent’ seems to be different than us laypeoples’. I was worried about edema more than a month before Burning Man was due to start so I went to a cardio doc who promptly ordered an urgent heart test scheduled August 31st, four weeks later and right in the middle of the fest. Missed it for the first time in ten years.
My brother said the same thing kept happening when his wife was succumbing to cancer. “That looks really nasty; we better schedule this special blood work-up – in six weeks.”
Keep annoying at them with a stick or something. Good luck.
I sympathize with you and your pain. None of it is easy. While nowhere near the level of problems your wife has my mother had her share including a descent into profound dementia.
I strongly recommend seeking help for her care be it a nurse who visits or putting her in a facility for her care or something else. With dementia it is easy for them to hurt themselves and you just can’t be present 100% of the time. Even in a facility it was remarkable the things my mom still managed to get up to (she sort of…painted…her bathroom with nail polish at one point – I was the one who found it before the staff did and when I walked in the bathroom I thought it was blood everywhere and freaked for a second [the smell though was of nail polish so it was only a moment of shock but still).
If you cannot obtain professional help then do what you can to get family to help. Get family help even if you have professional help. It is really too much of a chore for one person to handle all the time. Even if you still do 85% of the care it is important you get some time for yourself in there to just chill for a bit.
This really goes with the above but DO NOT neglect your own well-being. In this case mostly mental but whatever it means to you be sure to take care of yourself both physically and mentally. It is easy to lose that when caring for her and it is to both of your benefit that you don’t burn out.
Also, I would start the process of getting medical power of attorney if you have not already done so. Talk it over with your sister and an attorney but it seems from what you have written you will need it.
All the best!
That’s great news she has consented to the surgery and that you were able to move things up. It also sounds like you are getting a plan in place, which doesn’t make your load any easier, but having a plan always helps to make sense out of situations that sometimes appear bigger than we can handle. Please keep us posted, I’m sending good thoughts for both of you.
The suggestion of a rehab facility after the surgery is an excellent one - talk to the doctor about that. Insurance should pay if there’s an argument that there is a medical necessity, though they might try weaseling out of it. My MIL spent a couple weeks in rehab after each of her two hip replacements. If she does go to one, be very visible to the staff because unfortunately we found that with the last one, they didn’t always provide all the services they should have done.
And it’ll give you a bit of a break from caregiving, which will be HUGE for your own health.
Does your job have any kind of Employee Assistance Program? If so, they might have some resources to help you out.
Does your wife have enough quarters of work to qualify for disability payments? I don’t know how that would work since she is already 65, but I wonder if the fact that the disability(ies) all started before that age might affect her eligibility for services now.
A couple of possibly-relevant quotes from that PDF:
Before age 65, you are eligible for Medicare Part A at
no cost if:You’ve been entitled to Social Security disability
People age 65 or older, who are citizens or permanent
residents of the United States, are eligible for Medicare
Part A. You’re eligible for Part A at no cost at age 65 if…Your spouse (living or deceased, including divorced
spouses) receives or is eligible to receive Social
Security or railroad retirement benefits;
What I’m getting at is: it sounds like she might have qualified for SSDI at some point, even though she might not have applied for them - and maybe applying now might qualify her for Medicare? I honestly have no clue, and you may well have looked into that already.
benefits for 24 months;
I was recently in hospital and I went to a rehab hospital afterwards (NOT orthopaedic surgery). I’d have thought that with ankle surgery, they’d have to give her rehab. She won’t just be able to leap up and be back to full mobility. There’ll be swelling and the usual things that happen with surgery and she’ll need to do some exercises to get things back to normal. It’s a bit of a no-brainer that orthopaedics would need rehab, when “ordinary” surgeries also need you to have it.
Have had surgeries on both ankles (had to have holes put through my ankle bones to run the tendons through. as they were so loose I was constantly breaking my ankles.) No rehab here - six weeks in a cast each time, a month in an air boot learning to bear weight again after that, and then I was allowed to get back to full weight bearing with no external apparatus. I was told these were apparently fairly invasive surgeries with more of a risk and recovery time than just surgically repairing a break, so it’s possible no rehab would be indicated just on the basis of the surgery alone.
(Am also in the US, if that means anything.)
Haven’t chimed in before know because frankly I don’t really know what to say, but I suppose in lieu of anything more pithy, wise or otherwise better, I’ll just offer my best wishes to you and your wife, kaylasdad.
It may do, there seems to be a lot of difference between insurers over there as to what people get 
I would expect physiotherapy to be needed when the cast comes off. Doing nothing very quickly makes bits “not work”. I lost all of my strength, just from lying about after surgery. You can’t just pick right back up from that, without some help.
Anyway, I hope Mrs OP gets all of the assistance she is entitled to and that she is entitled to plenty.
She has never been found eligible for SSDI, as she doesn’t have forty quarters of employment history. She spent many years before we got married on SSI (and several months in the early 2000s, when I spent more than two years unemployed), but that doesn’t help her.
As I posted above, I don’t become Medicare-eligible for another three years. I’ve been told that as long as I keep her on my health insurance until then, I’ll be able to enroll her in Medicare Part A with me, and not be subjected to any penalties for enrolling her outside her three-month window.
This week I’ll be starting six weeks of FMLA sick leave. I’ll be using some of that time exploring physical therapy options.
My understanding is that if you are 62, and your wife is 65, she can claim Medicare based on your work record and not pay Part A premiums. I recommend looking into it. She can have Medicare and also keep your PPO plan through work at the same time.
Best wishes to you in this difficult time.
Kaylasdad99 I wish you peace. You deserve it. You’re a good person doing the right things. I might be jaded, but I think that’s rare these days. Keep up the good work. And I have to echo everyone upthread. Take care of yourself. Look into respite care. Help her by helping yourself.
I wish I had more I could do or say.
Yes, PT I did have. It wasn’t a rehab type situation though - I saw the therapist at my doctor’s clinic every week or so and she showed me exercises to do at home.
Which brings up a point that is very important. kaylasmom absolutely needs to do any exercises prescribed - not trying to be alarmist, but failure to do so could easily mean she loses use of that ankle. (My therapst may or may not have regaled me with horror stories of non-compliant patients. I was downright religious about the exercises.) I’ll keep my fingers crossed that she’s compliant with that - it sounds like there’s a real possibility she would get ornery about it.
How did the surgery go? Is she recovering?
I hope everything turns out OK.
Same here. Please update when you can, kaylasdad99. I hope you’re both coping well.
Yes, and some supervision might be necessary to make sure she does them and does them properly, a visiting physical therapist, if she’s at home (if that’s covered).
I don’t remember if you have ever mentioned what city you live in. My local Visiting Nurses Association was absolutely supportive in their guidance and instruction as I learn to do my physical therapy at home.
AND they are not the spouse. Some patients are more inclined to listen to a medical professional who is not a relative.
I’m not saying that is the case with you and your dear wife but it is sometimes the case.
I greatly admire your dedication to the oath you made to your spouse all those years ago. Too many of us allow the tribulations of life to get in the way of remembering those words.
Please look into getting help with your wife. Even the most able bodied and mentally fit person can reach burnout. You must find time to take care of yourself if you are going to continue helping her.
Your situation is sad but there seems to be a tremendous amount of strength involved in working through it.
If you send me a PM with the county you are located I will help you with locating resources to choose from.
Hang in, know that there are others who want to help and stay strong. You are a rare individual and have my utmost respect.