Mental issues can be treated. My mother’s last few months she was given medication as needed for anxiety.
Let me state once again - home care is HARD. MY family did it - but I went physically moved into mom and dad’s apartment, I had three people giving me relief on a schedule throughout the week (one of them doing all the grocery/sundry shopping and the other doing all the cleaning), I was not holding an outside job at the time (it happened I was already unemployed at the time) and, most important, one of my sisters is an MD and a hospice director which gave us an enormous advantage over the average family. And it was STILL VERY HARD. Both physically and emotionally.
Taking care of someone completely bedridden and dying is goddamned hard. I can not emphasize that enough.
How often could you visit her if you didn’t move your parents? Could your father do the daily visits?
It’s strictly my opinion, but I think moving your dying mother and your father to where you are is a bad idea. I don’t see any particular advantage for your mother’s care, and it would take your father out of HIS familiar environment and whatever support system he might have there.
If you’re that stressed out I encourage you to seek some help for yourself. The stress is only going to increase. There are many options out there for reducing stress on you and I encourage you to look into them for your own health.
A few notes on having home health care, some of which have already been noted. This is from my experience in Indiana as a home health aide.
$10 an hour is probably cheap, and most likely for that price you would get uncertified, self-employed caregivers. Not necessarily a bad thing, but that means someone at home has to handle the scheduling as well as the orientation of every single new caregiver who comes into the home. For 24/7 care (which will probably be needed at some point) or even 12 hr/day shifts…that’s a LOT of people coming in and out, and high turnover would be normal. If you don’t have an agency and you hire a private caregiver, that person will probably not have any type of insurance to cover any accidents or injuries he or she causes to the client. You’d also need to look into the tax situation and see if you can just contract with the caregiver and then 1099 her at tax time. (That’s what I did when I worked privately, but I had to request it; the family wasn’t planning to submit any tax forms, etc.)
Around here, you can hire an agency to do home care. My agency charged just under $20/hr. Most of us are uncertified and only a few are really trained. Some agencies only have certified Home Health Aides, but mom may need more skilled care than that at some point. Some agencies have SOME Certified Nursing Aides, but you’d have to specifically request them and hope the agency does what you ask. There would not be quite so much orientation/training by family as other caregivers could handle some of it, but again, family has to handle some of it and high turnover is not at all unusual.
Nursing facilities are not all bad. Many retirement community types have multiple levels of care. Mom and Dad could live in an apartment with assistance as needed throughout the day (nurse checks for meds, help with showers, that sort of thing) or with a caregiver for a few hours each day. As things progress, Mom may be moved down the hall to an assisted living section, which is somewhere between independent and actual nursing home care…plenty of aides to help with daily activities, but also a private room, that sort of thing. And eventually, there would be a more intensive nursing home/hospice type care, often in the same building or just adjacent to the independent living facility.
I deliver papers to a facility just like this and there are several in my small town. They’re very, very nice and people who move in there seem to stay forever. It’s definitely worth looking into. And if your dad doesn’t want to leave his home (not at all unusual), the your mom could go straight into the most appropriate care level for where she is right now.
The reason I asked is because as best as I can see, more than onhce, Lurgic as stated that the answer to the problem is to have both parents move up. This has been after every’s advice to the contrary. Lurgic has also stated that the father can easily afford home care but simply does not want them in his home.
I am in complete agreement with you, it’s a bad idea. The OP feels that moving both parents is the best idea and that, work aside, she has no issues taking care of the mom. If that is the case, then why not just move mom and hire caregivers while she is at work?
Good point. There are those who will be martyrs or will claim that putting someone into, or allowing someone to be moved into, a nursing home is horrible and selfish and that the fam should care for the patient 24/7. But this takes a terrible toll on the caregivers, what with the stress, isolation, frustration, etc.
People who work in nursing homes are paid to be there and they don’t generally work 24/7 because, you know, they have shifts. There are also many medical students who come in to help with feeding and other duties.
There are also different levels of care, activities, music, games, and more , not to mention visitors.
Remember all those TV exposes they used to show years ago about rotten nursing homes? Well, those led to much tougher regulations and inspections, and thus to improvement. I’m not saying that every place is going to be great, but it’s certainly not the worst option.
My mom died of Alzheimer’s a few years ago, long after my dad died. We were able to keep her at home the first couple of years with home visits, but we finally had to move her to a nursing home (her preference, made clear and in writing long before the dementia started). I was so very worried for her. I thought she’d hate it.
I can’t say she had a grand old time, but it was really good for her. There was music all the time–visiting musicians, school groups, demented people chorus. She painted every day, always in purple. She had never painted before. There was more to stimulate her mind than she ever could have had at home. I think it really improved her quality of life in her final years. And as she declined, she had round the clock care. She needed non-stop help-we never could have provided it. And the staff was really experienced with things like paranoia–they see a lot of it.
I’m grateful that she took the decision out of our hands by leaving us clear instructions. And I’m so grateful to the staff of that nursing home.
Does your Mom have an opinion? I will tell you what, I believe my husband would not be able to provide personal intimate care for me for any length of time if I was incapacitated. He would try, I am sure. He’s not going to like it, and me too, I won’t like it. I mean to say, its not going to work out so good. I don’t think I would really like having one of my kids helping me out with a lot of dirty work either. Its bad when you need constant care, maybe she would be more comfortable at a place where its not so personal? Don’t let her become a burden to you or her husband, you can still see her, talk to her, just make it easier. I think if you feel obligated to take care of your mother, it fulfills some large part of that obligation to get her physical needs met. This way what time you may have with her yet can be more peaceful. You, and your father, aren’t bad guys because yinz can’t care for her. A lot of people just aren’t well suited to be care givers, to be gentle and thoughtful. If her husband wants to make sure she is taken care of that seems like a good thing.
Right on.
Round-the-clock care at home would wear out virtually any family member unless that person could quit working, have tons of money to hire assistants, and be able to deal physically and emotionally with the realities of constant care.
That’s what the nursing home and its staff are for.
Thank you for this post.
We were lucky enough to hire student nurses earring their bachelor’s from the local university, plus one friend of the family who had been a sitter for years. This, with a few shifts covered by CNAs from the assisted living facility where my mom lived, got us through the last few months of my mom’s life. They were able to study or otherwise amuse themselves, so it worked out. My sister and I visited often. So, no, in my area, and for the help that was needed, $10 an hour wasn’t insane.
Have any of you got your parents on MedicAID? Was that hard to do? Did it take a long time? Were you approved, or did you have to re-submit? And once approved for Medicaid, then what? How did that work out, and what kind of care did it cover? 24/7? A few hours a week?
If you aren’t available and won’t make yourself available to take care of a dying loved one, you don’t get to decide how someone else goes about doing it. You are understandably upset by the awful situation, but your father is not your adversary here. He can’t handle doing it without your help, so in your absence will go with the next-best alternative as he sees it. Maybe you can get him to let you help him find home help he will be happier with (someone Turkish perhaps), but the decision is up to your parents. Does your mother have an opinion about it?
Could he afford live in help? He probably can’t care for her without help. So would it be possible to take her to the nursing home basically for short visits so that she could get to know the people working and living there before your leave runs out?