Dad died March 6th in a nursing home. Mom was there with him for 2 weeks priior to his death. My sister and I wanted to keep her there but she eloped several times and we were told we had to find a Memory Care unit. After much looking we found one, but yesterday when we visited she seemed better than all the rest of the residents. We wonder if we put her in a place too soon. I don't know all the stages of Alzheimers. I am 18 years younger than mom, but been a caregiver of husband, grandchildren, etc. and have a part time job as well. I don't know how I can keep her at home while I work; however the guilt of leaving her at the Memory Care unit is eating me up. It is too far away to visit but once a week. She has only been there one week.
The best thing to do is to put personal feelings aside and find a nursing or care home where the atmosphere feels friendly and warm, where the staff are kind and patient with the inmates and where a lot of effort is made to keep their spirits up with entertainments, changing decorations to illustrate the seasons, and accompanied visits to sit in a garden on a sunny day. You should not choose just the home that is closest to you. Alzheimer sufferers have absolutely no idea of the passage of time, so afthey won't really notice if you haven't paid the usual weekly visit. If you get the patient to regard the new place as a hotel, it's amazing how quickly they will settle down and become so used to the routine that it will be difficult to take them away "for a treat".
Don't put off the decision to move the patient to a home too long. Patients get stressed when their carers are stressed, and your idea of what makes them happy is not the same as theirs. Patients over the age of 80 will start retreating into themselves anyway. It's the patients in their late 60s and early 70s who will need careful persuasion to move into the "new hotel" and it can be weeks before they stop asking to be driven home and away from their fellow inmates. But give it a few weeks longer, and the "hotel" will have become their home.
Your feelings about this will not matter. For Alzheimer sufferers, the greatest need is security, knowing there is someone on call 24/7 and working out what to do next. If they can't, sleep is often the answer.
I'm in total agreement with you - I placed my near 93 year old mom in a leading memory care facility and it is a nightmare - I am now paying for a private caregiver 12 hours a day on top of their high facility fees - all levels of Alzheimer's are placed together and the men especially get quite violent - staff are afraid of them and they're supposed to be memory care experts
my mom who can do math in her head and spell backwards doesn't understand why she's with these folks - when I take her out for a treat or to the doctor she wants to know why I turned down the wrong street to go home - she can draw a map of where she lived for nearly 70 years
Clearly she has memory loss and is easily agitated but
Memory care is no real care - they don't help her get ready fo bed and she fell shortly afte getting there from weakness and dehydration from a UTI - often they don't even put a diaper on her
She is not bedridden but one more fall could change that - she needs a safe place but memory care is scary
But the answer always comes back: "there is no budget/space" to create parallel safe facilities for those who are lucid between memory lapses and those who are not. They cannot pay for two parallel teams of nurses.
In Belgium, all care homes advertising spaces for Alzheimers sufferers have to pass rigorous new legal requirements. If they fail, they are not allowed to take in people with any stage of Alzheimer's. Over two years this led to a 50% loss in offer of available residential spaces.
I get angry with my mom. I get angry for many reasons....the same question over and over, or her asking me how to do something that I know full well she knows how. My mom is an alcoholic as well. My mom has Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome. It is like Alzheimers or dementia but it was alcohol induced. My mom is a "happy" drunk so we don't have that issue.
The reason my mom doesn't live with me is because I AM NOT DAUGHTER OF THE YEAR and I get frustrated AND angry sometimes.