Care needs are always changing; Your responses should, too

“I can’t do it anymore,” one client lamented on caring for her mother in her home while balancing a job and young children, too.

“What pushed you over the limit?” I asked.

“Mom beginning to get up in the middle of the night,” she said.

It’s a common scenario in people declining with memory issues.

“I think we need to move her, but I don’t think we can afford it,” she added.

I wondered aloud if we could make some adjustments to make this “new normal” more manageable and extend the amount of time Mom could stay at home.

I knew that Mom preferred to sleep in in the mornings and was irritable when her daughter woke her up to get to adult day care by 7:45. Due to cost, Mom went to day care three full days per week. What if we reduced the length of those days to 12 to 6 and then had her go everyday? This would not only give the daughter some relief everyday, but also work better with Mom’s new sleep cycle and give the daughter some undisturbed morning time.

In this case, the daughter also spoke to her mom’s physician and added an over-the-counter sleep aide, melatonin, and also a weighted blanket that helped Mom resettle more easily when she woke in the middle of the night. These three actions together worked (for the moment).

With another client, who could no longer drive, we set up Go-go grandparent, a subsidiary of Uber, allowing her to order rides on her phone instead of calling her son. We also arranged a regular ride to church on Sundays.

For another, who was overwhelmed by her yard work, taking the heavy trash and recycling bins to the street and walking her dog, we enlisted the help of a neighbor’s teenage son, wanting to make some pocket money.

And in yet another case, where Dad was no longer able to manage his many meds, we had the pharmacist package them in "blister packs," in which all dad had to do was go to day and time of day (morning, midday, evening) and pop out the meds for that time. (Some pharmacies provide this service for a fee, maybe $10/month; while others provide it for free if you are on three meds/month or more.)

The point of this post is to prompt you, when an overwhelming need arises—for your parent or yourself, to step back, take a breath and see if there might be a creative solution that doesn’t require something so drastic as a sudden move from home to Assisted Living or Memory Care.

It reminds me of the problem of trying to get each of my kids to sleep through the night. I threw a lot of things at “the problem,” from staying in their bed until they fell asleep to white noise to a special blankie. As my children grew up, the issues changed and the responses had to accordingly. As our parents decline, we can apply the same philosophy.

Approach it like a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. Does this piece work? If not, set it aside and look for another. This is not to say that there are not times you simply need to move Mom or Dad out of their home and into residential care. It is to say, before doing so, there might be a few more tricks up the sleeve to extend the time they can stay safely at home.

[Please send me innovative ways you have handled elder needs and I might feature them in a future column.]