Reply to Send Mom to nursing home?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP if I were you I would have a long talk with your sister about how Mom is doing. Here's what I have gotten from your post:

- ER 5 times in a year
- Poor diet, only eating sweet things
- Dehydrated because she won't drink most things
- Disoriented
- Frequent falls
- 88 years old
- 1 traumatic head injury

It's tough but I think you should look into a hospice evaluation. She will qualify if they believe she has 6 months left to live. They usually can tell pretty accurately. If you go this route, you have to really embrace the idea that you are switching from a diagnostic/treatment focus to comfort care/helping her pass peacefully. Hospice does not provide caregivers or anything like that, though you might be able to get 2 weeks of in patient hospice respite care after rehab to get things in order for her to return home. The focus becomes minimizing pain/suffering and helping her in her last six months through medication.

Honestly, doctors are terrible at recommending hospice. They will push endless rehab/hospital stays, which can be traumatic and useless. They will advise treatment plans for patients with less than 6 months left to live because they are scared of having frank conversations with family members. If she is eligible for hospice, that would inform how you handle things.

Nursing homes (or rather, in your case memory care) are not some kind of panacea. When you move your loved one there, you give up care which has pros and cons. You deal with management issues, staff issues, having to stay on top of care quality, and a whole host of issues that are also exhausting. No nursing homes will 100% prevent falls, because the supervision is not 24/7. It really sucks to see the falls happen. Often times nursing homes might push for private duty on top of the monthly rate if the resident falls a lot.[/quote]

Be very careful with hospice. There are good programs/facilities that carry on the tradition of treating people with dignity and helping them be comfortable until natural death. Others are factories with a one size fits all program of “more morphine.”  If a hospice program tells you that antibiotics are “treatment” that must be discontinued rather than a comfort measure because infection feels lousy, run. [/quote]

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