The physical aspect of elder care, bathing, dressing, feeding, transportation can be made routine. You can find shortcuts or get help to make it easier on yourself. The negative emotional aspects of anger, frustration, isolation, and guilt are more difficult to deal with. These emotions creep up on you, complicate your life and your care [...]
Now that the surgery is over your loved one (LO) will go to his/her room upon leaving the recovery room. Picking the right accommodation means getting a private room.
If you are caring for an elderly parent with chronic conditions chances are that at some point they will be staying in a hospital. In the seven years that we took care of my father-in-law he was in the hospital thirteen times. Eight of those admissions resulted in a subsequent stay in a re-hab facility.
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.
Falls are a huge, huge issue in elder care. Case in point. I was visiting my father-in-law in rehab. I saw his former room mate and I asked, “Rudy, why are you here?” He said, “I fell and I was on the floor for five days. Now I’m here in rehab.”