Yesterday I shared some of the excuses not to plan for elder care that Dan Taylor wrote about in his book, The Parent Care Conversation. The reality is that if you accept an excuse now you will pay a heavier price later. It may be much more costly to deal with certain problems and some [...]
Dan Taylor has written a wonderful book entitled The Parent Care Conversation. In the book he writes about how to have the critical conversations with your elderly parent(s). The earlier you have these conversations the more options you have and the better you can manage the job of elder care. And it is a job. [...]
One of the reasons that the elderly don’t tell you what’s going on is that they fear for the loss of their independence which is quite reasonable. They also don’t want to appear incompetent or admit that they need help. In some cases the elderly don’t want to be a burden on their children.
One question that I keep thinking about is how we missed the signals. Why did we not see this coming? Or better yet, why did we choose not to see? This is not just an academic question. If we got this right, at the beginning we could have saved ourselves so much grief. I wonder [...]
During the time we took care of my father-in-law, we had thirteen trips in the hospital and eight stays in rehab. In addition, we brought him to dialysis treatment at the hospital three times a week for two years. This meant that we were dependant on other people for the quality of his care. We [...]
A touchy subject regarding falls is restraining the elderly patient.
There are things we tried to do to minimize my father-in-law’s falling. We made sure that he had his vitamins and minerals, especially, calcium and vitamin D. We also tried to get him to exercise every day although he often tried to get out of doing it. To make it easier for us to work [...]
Falls weren’t something that we thought very much about before starting elder care. The last time anyone fell was years ago when our children were learning to walk or when someone was distracted and tripped over something. After falling they would get up. When my father-in-law fell for the first time and I went to [...]
Fall prevention should be a major concern when you are responsible for providing elder care. To give you an idea of the scope of the problem the following are statistics supplied by the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention.