What the Steps in being a Caretaker for My Older Adult Parents taught me

People have asked me how I was trained to work with Older Adults under Medicare. I did not get graduate level training in my Ph.D. Counseling Psychology program but rather the fact is that I had 14 years of training to prepare me. You see I was the principal caretaker for both my aging Father and Mother in their final years.

Step 1: When my father was becoming more and more fragile and weak, I was visiting he and my mom up in Batavia New York and offered to them to move them down to Florida to live in Bradenton, Florida where my wife and I had bought a Condo from my Aunt Rose and Uncle Charlie. They accepted our offer, and we flew with them both down to Florida after we assisted them to put our family homestead up for sale in Batavia.

Step 2: We arranged in Bradenton for my parents to have their doctors and medical needs met and were amazed how well my father flourished with this move. Once they sold their house in Batavia, they bought their condo from my wife and me which was part of the agreement to convince them they would be independent from strict oversight from us once they moved down to Florida.

Step 3: Dad was very content in his new living arrangement as was my mother. She, being an LPN, got back into providing medical support to the residents of the condo association in which they lived, and this kept them busy. Things went well until my father three years later got pneumonia and was hospitalized and died within days of entering the hospital. Mom was sad over Dad’s death, and she began to withdraw and isolating herself from contact with us given we lived about an hour away in Tampa. Finally, one year later she called us and said: “Please get me out of here I can’t keep them from attacking me.” She had become very paranoid and when my wife and I agreed to move her. Upon arriving at her Condo we were startled by what she had done to the condo. She had taped all the windows and doors and had piled papers and boxed all over the condo. It took us a few days to clean out the condo and we filled 4 large commercial dumpster bins with the trash from inside of her condo.

Step 4: My wife and I had begun to research alternative living arrangements for both my parents prior to their move to Bradenton just in case they could not survive on their own. We did visit and examined three well known comprehensive Seniors Centers in Tampa which included: Independent Living, Assisted Living, Rehabilitation Nursing services, and Memory Units. We had settled on one called John Knox Village which was only 5 minutes from our house in Tampa when Mom had called us to get her “out of there.”

Step 5: We were able to sell my parents’ condo as soon as Mom moved out of her unit. We were able to set up financial procedures which would enable us to monitor Mom’s finances and to guarantee she would be covered financially for the remainder of her last 10 years of life. We then were able to enroll Mom in John Knox Village which at the time required that a resident in independent living could pass their screening to live independently and had the financial ability to purchase their independent living apartment. We purchased furniture for Mom’s apartment and helped her settle in. We were relieved that she had passed the screening for independent living since the initial investment made to purchase her unit would guarantee her coverage at John Knox Village no matter what happened to her health or physical viability.

Step 6: It only took three months for Mom to decline rapidly and then she fell and went to rehab. Upon release from rehab, she was moved to Assisted Living where she was monitored daily and provided all types of personal support and participation in physical rehab to help her regain her mobility. Unfortunately, she was never able to walk independently after rehab and was in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. She was getting 24-7 care and support and we were there all the time to make sure she knew we were there to support and encourage her wellbeing.

Step 7: Mom was in Assisted Living for about a year, but her mental status was waning over that time and eventually John Knox Village asked us to approve Mom to enter their memory unit. This setting was a stable setting for mom in that all of her fellow residents were at the same level of physical and mental functioning and the routine schedule in the setting was calming and supportive. In her final year of the memory unit, she declined even greater to the point of no longer being able to speak or to understand what was being said to her. It was at this point that staff moved Mom to their last option for residents which was their Alzheimer’s-Dementia Unit where Mom remained for the last two years of her life. My wife and I visited one to three times a week over the last six years of my mother’s life at John Knox Village which enabled me to learn an encyclopedia of needs of Aging Seniors which prompted me to take up working in Senior facilities when I retired from Private Practice in 1999 while my mom was still a resident at John Knox Village.

Irony of Irony

In 2009, the last year of my fulltime work with Vericare a Health Care Agency which had contracts with Older Adults Centers asked to take over their contract with John Knox Village in Tampa fulltime. I was excited because I could give back to John Knox Village the gratitude, I felt for their fantastic 10 years of care for my mother. At my initial introductory meeting with the administrative staff at John Knox Village there were lots of tears shed in seeing me again and in finding out I would be the psychologist assigned to work with them in the care of their patients. They and I knew that I had a “familial relationship” with the staff in that they let me know over all those years that my wife and I were the only regular visitors to their patients and that we developed a close relationship with the staff. It was a wonderful year of work for me which ended when I accepted a full-time teaching load at Troy University’s Tampa Campus in Clinical Mental Health Training.