Caregivers and Stress

[Kelt]

Originally Posted by DapperButch

Chad, Kelt lives far from his mom and he has been able to manage it. I am sure he will come in and give you some ideas.

My role in order to "take care" of mom is to NOT move. Like, I no longer see myself as having that choice since we live near each other. My sister is on the other side of the country. Don't feel bad for me though, I like where I live. But, there are also a couple of other places I have fantasized moving to. Also, my sister will be very involved with getting/keeping things set up for mom. I won't be alone in it, even if I lead it.

I don't expect that my mother will ever live with me though. She has a large long term care insurance plan which gives the option for people to come to her house instead of her moving into a facility. She can use her monthly allotted amount however she would like. We hope that unless she has cognitive difficulties that she would be able to stay there until the end.

All of you guys are amazing for what you do for your parents. My hat is off to you. Hang in there.

I'll step in with a couple of thoughts and if there is interest some of us can talk about it in depth. Since this has been my whole life for the last year and a half I could go on forever...

First, Chad, your mothers social support network is invaluable, if she has one now you might think about being the one to move. If she loses it and can't form a new network in a new place you become that too and it can seriously affect her health and your availability of time for anything else.

Second, there are two ways to do this, bluntly it's about money. This is expensive no matter how you do it and you will pay with either cash/insurance or time spent doing things yourself and finding resources through other services/agencies. Each way has its own advantages/disadvantages, my mother has money so I can hire a lot out BUT...

Dapper, are you listening? There are tons of services available to the elderly if they low income qualify. If they have assets, all of that just evaporates.

I didn't want to move my mother out of her house right away but weirdly it boiled down to transportation. She needed to be taken places because the week my father died their car did too, not repairable and mom wasn't too good behind the wheel anyway. Their town had plenty of options, the big elderly transport for hire system (oops, you can't use it unless a specific diagnosis or are resident in a "community") or the non-profit version of the same for anybody; except she lived one block over the county line. Many small independent outfits to drive folks to their medical appointments - all income qualified - no go if you have resources (and what about things like getting groceries or a haircut?) Taxi? No company large enough to trust and unreliable at best in her location.

The only way I can see doing this from a distance, and I am very fortunate in this, is to not have to work. I do have to drop everything and go, with very little notice, for undetermined periods of time, on a regular basis. Maybe self employed - non-location dependent. It's all about finding good comprehensive systems and then tying them together. My mother lives in a very nice community in an independent apartment with a private car and driver, cook, houskeeping, etc. I have an additional system on top of the one there for private medical help, which as I posted, came into play yesterday, again...

There are several people on this site with a variety of situations going through this right now. Chad, ASK. If you haven't done this or been around it before the learning curve is steep. Voice some of your concerns and folks with matching circumstances may step in or folks like me can give some best guess or anecdotical ideas.