Reply to I didn't fully comprehend the cost of eldercare

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote] Hello from hell in SC! I’m reporting that my 80 year old mother with dementia in a memory care facility is currently costing 36k a month due to the need for 24/7 private aids due to lots of falls![/quote]

Maybe she should be allowed to fall. My mother was mid stage 6 , fell, fractured her pelvis, went on hospice and passed a month later on about of morphine and Ativan. It was more more in line with what she would have wanted (and articulated to me for years) than being kept barely alive while draining any remaining funds.

I know it’s not an easy decision but my mom had done a dementia directive and there wasn’t much to be done anyway. [/quote]

Hindsight being 20/20 I wish I would have done what this PP did when my mom fell last summer.  I fought tooth and nail for the hospital to not admit her after a fall, knowing a hospital admission would have killed her at that point.   In retrospect that would have been a much more humane decision, but I really thought at the time I was doing the right thing by getting her back to her memory care where she felt comfortable.  She’s been ever so slowly deteriorating (and on hospice) since then.  We’re close to the end but my insistence bought her another year of suffering.  [/quote]

How would have a hospital admission killed her at that point?[/quote]

Someone suffering from dementia, even the early stages (which she was not at this particular point) does not do well in a hospital setting.  They often get delirium which is similar to but even more fun than dementia (last time my mom got it she started screaming at the top of her lungs at the woman who was evaluating her for rehab that the poor woman was just there to steal all her money- needless to say she was not found fit to go to that particular rehab).  They need a sitter in their rooms, or a motion sensor for if they try to get out of bed.  And the beeping and new environment and nurses coming in all the time just does a number on them.  In my mom’s case it always led to them over medicating her which led to multiple additional days in the hospital which led to more overmedicating.  After many days of this pattern she’d need rehab because she’d physically deteriorate.  Then she’d need private one on one care in rehab due to the dementia.  At this stage of the game she’d never make it out of the hospital.

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