Mommy Duty

It's been a whirlwind July. I planned on visiting my mother who lives in Sun City CA early this month. To avoid driving over the fourth of July weekend I left on Monday the 7th. My plan was to stay until Thursday or Friday and while I was there to have a serious discussion about the next stage of her life. At age 82 we all knew that she couldn't stay in the home she and my dad had bought out there thirty years ago. It was way too big for one person and I was getting the feeling that she really wasn't able to take care of it any more and was almost ready for something smaller with a plan for the rest of her life.

Well, life is what happens while we're making plans. After dinner Monday night I had to take her to the hospital for extreme shortness of breath. She spent the night in the emergency room because there weren't any room available and was moved to a hospital room the next morning. In talking to her doctor I learned that he'd been telling her for some time that she should be living alone and that she had some "mild cognitive impairment." Although she is generally healthy for someone her age, the cognitive impairment meant that she got confused about her medication. What led us to the hospital was the fact that she must not have been taking her blood thinner and blood pressure medicine appropriately.

The result was that between visiting her in the hospital--once that got her heart rhythms regularized she felt pretty good--I was touring the local retirement homes and making arrangement for her to move into one soon after her release from the hospital. She moved into an independent living one-bedroom apartment the following Monday. Independent living means that she can keep doing what she's been doing, going to church and out with her friends, but there's someone else monitoring her meds and seeing that she takes what the doctor ordered on the schedule he prescribed. We also got her set up with the visiting nurses to change the dressing on an open wound she has on her leg that hasn't been healing. Again, I think she was having a hard time remembering to follow the doctor's orders there.

My sister came out and did yeomen's duty de-trashing the house and getting her moved into her new digs. I came home for a couple of days while Peggy was there to take care of some things here. Then went back to be sure everything was settle, at least for the short term. While mom's still pretty good mentally we got the durable powers of attorney signed and I got signature cards for her bank accounts. Luckily most of her financial business is set to run on its own, checks are directly deposited and bills automatically paid, so her account weren't in as bad of a situation as they could have been. But of the few things that she should have been doing, nothing had been done since the first of the year and some things were hanging longer than that. I got all the financial business caught up, all the outstanding bills paid and all the checks laying around the house deposited. Luckily we paid the health insurance before it was cancelled! [Wrong! Found out later that we paid too late so her insurance has been cancelled. I'm not on the hunt for replacement Medi-Gap insurance. Ugh!] Financially she's in good shape at least for the short run.

Over the next couple of months, I will be going to see her more regularly, getting her RV sold, cleaning out the house so we can sell it and deciding if the place she's in now is the best for the long run or if she should be somewhere else. I'm blessed to have a wonderful husband and a great sibling who are each doing what they can to make this work out the best for my mom.

UPDATE 10/31/08: It's been a couple of months. Mom spent six weeks in the hospital fighting a colon infection but she's back in the apartment now and seems to be doing much better. We've disposed of the RV and between Peggy, my self and Caroline, a friend from my hometown that she considers another daughter, we've begun cleaning out the house. So we can eventually sell it. I was gratified the last time I went to visit that there aren't too many "For Sale" signs in her neighborhood. Since it's a 55+ subdivision it's got a limited appeal which may work for us (lots of folks still want to move to California) or against us (they may have to wait to retire and/or won't be able to sell their existing homes).

So the sage continues!