Helping Parents Stay Out of a Nursing Home?
The Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times recently published an instructive article explaining in detail what adult children can do to help our parents stay out of nursing homes.
Written by Karen Ravn, the article suggests focusing on nine specific issues that make an enormous difference in the safety and security of a senior parent’s home environment — where most elders want to live as long as they can.
Best Quote in the Article
According to Dr. David Reuben, Geriatrics Chief at UCLA’s Department of Medicine, “… there’s always a tension between autonomy and safety. Children may want to err on the side of safety, but parents may want to err on the side of autonomy.”
One of the reasons that I am so excited about the Green House® Homes construction at Virginia Mennonite Retirement Community (VMRC), where my parents live, is the added option that these new dwellings will provide for my family, should one of my parents be unable to continue living at home. While their goal (and mine) is for them to live at home, we do not know what may happen to alter our plans, and it’s wonderful to know that required care can be available in a setting other than a nursing home. Moreover, one of the many advantages of Green House® Homes is that they help elders maintain their autonomy.
These four As Our Parents Age posts describe the process at VMRC. Watch for more that describe the construction. Read more »
Dementia Reality Tour
Click to visit the slide show.
An article in the San Jose Mercury News describes a multi-sensory experience that simulates the perceptions and struggles of a person suffering from dementia. In Santa Clara ‘Dementia Reality Tour’ Shows What It’s Like to Live with the Affliction, Mercury News reporter Helen Shen describes how the simulation asks caregivers to complete routine activities of daily living (ADLs) while wearing gloves, goggles, socks, and certain accouterments that approximate the perceptions of a person with the brain disease.
Rick Carson of Immersion Reality Education designed the activities for family members to give them a sense of what it’s really like. The article includes reactions from many family members who find that the activities are helping them gain more understanding of their family member with dementia.
Read the story and take a few minutes to look at the slide show of participants completing the various tasks.
Middle Age, Senior Years, Elder Years, REPEAT or RERUN
A view from my kayak - summer 2008
My husband and I are empty nesters. Over these past few years, as blog readers know, we helped to support his parents, now deceased. These days we regularly touch base with my parents by phone and in person as often as possible, and though they are currently independent and active, at times they welcome our help.
Now we, too, are also beginning to think about retirement, and it’s never far from our thoughts. Even with no specific deadlines and daily jobs we really like, even as time passes in a relaxed sort of way, we find ourselves imagining the next developmental stage of our lives. What will we do? Will we work part-time? How about ushering some evenings at theatres? Will we be able to travel as much as we want? Oh, and how will our financial resources hold out?
The proprietors over at the Inside Aging Parents blog, and especially Bill Shanks, are writing some interesting posts about the beginning of retirement and the necessary decision-making, and their thoughts address many of my questions. If you, too, are beginning to think about this late-in-life developmental stage, I encourage you to head on over there and check out Bill’s posts.
Epidemiologists, Disease Detecting, and Media Literacy
From time to time a small outbreak of an uncommon disease occurs — often in an unexpected location. Sometimes it’s publicized and we hear about it, but at other times the outbreak is small enough that most people only hear after the fact. Either way, many of our elderly parents, and many of us, find out about these outbreaks while watching television, and the news reports are often hyped and scary. All of us need to develop the skill to seek more information and figure out what is left out of a news report.
Click here to learn about a career in epidemiology.
Rarely do such short television news stories explain the extraordinary successes of disease detection and disease detectives — how they collect facts, put them together, and puzzle out possible answers. The people in charge of this process are epidemiologists, scientists, sometimes but not always physicians, who explore the way a disease moves from place to place and how it might be controlled.
Legionella bacteria from the National Library of Medicine image gallery.
In January, many of us heard, mostly on TV and radio but also via print and Internet sources, how a small outbreak (eight cases) of Legionnaires’ disease occurred at a hospital in Wisconsin within a short period of time. We heard about this outbreak, which occurred in 2010, because of a journal article, An Outbreak of Legionnaires Disease Associated with a Decorative Water Wall Fountain in a Hospital published in the February 2012 issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology. Read more »
iPad for Dad, #21: An Easy-to-Use Speaker
My dad loves to listen to music, mostly classical, but other musical genres as well. Mostly he fires up his stereo, a boom-box, or the local classical music radio station.
Now, he has a third option — listening with his iPad.
For Christmas we gave Dad the iHome rechargeable portable speaker for iPad. The iPad itself simply sits in the doc, the same way it sits on Dad’s keyboard dock. While the iHome sound isn’t quite at the quality of his stereo speakers, it’s good.
We downloaded the TuneIn RadioPro app which streams all types of music and programming from hundreds of radio stations. I preset seven or eight classical and jazz music stations as well as a baseball channel and a few talk shows. All dad has to do it touch the preset buttons.
If he wants to do more with TuneInRadio, and I expect he will, we can do more instruction later.
If you like this post, check out the others in the iPad for Dad series. iPad for Dad, #1, iPad for Dad, #2, iPad for Dad, #3, iPad for Dad, #4, iPad for Dad, #5, iPad for Dad, #6, iPad for Dad, #7, iPad for Dad, #8, iPad for Dad, #9, iPad for Dad, #10, iPad for Dad, #11, iPad for Dad, #12, iPad for Dad, #13, iPad for Dad, #14, iPad for Dad, #15, iPad for Dad, #16, iPad for Dad, #17 , iPad for Dad, #18, iPad for Dad, #19, and iPad for Dad, #20.
More Cuts to Aging And Caregiving Services
In Slow Starvation of Senior Services columnist Howard Gleckman writes that Congress, shortly before going on Christmas recess, cut funding for a number of services for seniors and elderly Americans. He describes how some program budgets for seniors and the elderly were cut outright, but that other programs are starved into reducing services when funds are not raised year after year.
For example, the Administration on Aging budget is one agency that provides senior services throughout the country, and its budget was cut by about 23 million dollars.
Gleckman points out that nothing much will be resolved until after the 2012 election.
Read the entire blog post at Gleckman’s Caring for Our Parents blog, where he also includes a link to a table summarizing the appropriations.
I meant to share this Forbes blog post about decreasing senior services just before the holidays in December.
Jane Gross on NPR’s Tell Me More
If you missed the Michel Martin’s Tell Me More on Monday, January 23, 2012, head over to the program’s website to hear Jane Gross talk about her book, A Bittersweet Season: Caring For Our Aging Parents and Ourselves. Her conversation covered a broad range of aging parent-adult child topics including Medicare, financial problems, end-of life issues, unexpected aging parent needs, and the need for caregivers to take better care of themselves.
Most Interesting Quote:
… I thought as a reporter I was capable of finding out everything I needed to know. I didn’t realize that the systems were so complicated, that they were coupled with the sort of emotional baggage of it being your mother and your brother, that you couldn’t just pick up the phone the way you did when you were a reporter and get an answer.
Amazing Alzheimer’s Videos Via a Small Hyperlink
When you read a good quality digital article or blog and think you know just about everything that it contains, check the hyperlinks — they may bring you some surprises. In fact, a small discrete hyperlink may open the door to resources that you don’t want to miss. In my case I discovered a set of terrific educational videos at the website of Johns Hopkins physician, Peter Rabins, produced for adult children and seniors who are helping to care for a family member with Alzheimer’s or dementia.
The defining characteristic of a blog – what makes it different from non-digital reading – is the use of hyperlinks that connect to related material. In theory, every good blog post presents information and ideas along with a few hyperlinks that connect to pertinent knowledge in other locations. I know that I’ve read a truly excellent post when a link leads me to new and exciting resources.
A January 20, 2012 post in the New Old Age blog illustrated just how beautifully the blogging process works.
In her post The Caregiver’s Bookshelf: An Alzheimer’s Classic, Paula Spann writes about the 30th anniversary of The 36 Hour Day, an Alzheimer’s disease resource book by Dr. Peter Rabins and Nancy Mace. I already knew about The 36 Hour Day, and I read the entire post quickly because I wanted to learn a bit more about what might be new in the updated edition. So quickly that I almost ignored a hyperlink near the end.
At the bottom of Spann’s post I discovered the link that leads to Dr. Rabins’ Johns Hopkins website. Read more »
Becoming A Grown-up Child…
One day in April 2007 my husband and I were the adult kids in our families — we are the only adult children
— and the next day we became what we laughingly call “real grown-ups,” helping first one, then two, and increasingly all three of our parents. It’s time to give back, and we do so willingly and happily. However the process is not easy, and it is not free from anxiety and tension. Check out the As Our Parents Age About page to learn more about the mission of this blog.
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Copyright and Attribution Info
As Our Parents Age by Marti Weston is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on work at AsOurParentsAge.wordpress.com and AsOurParentsAge.net
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available by emailing As Our Parents Age. To learn more about this blog go to the AsYourParentsAge About page.
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