National Senior Health & Fitness Day is May 27th

May 27, 2015 is National Senior Health & Fitness Day! It is so important to take care of our loved ones who are seniors. Even if they are independent, it is important to encourage them to take good care of themselves. I am the youngest grandchild on my mom’s side. I am the youngest of ten so by the time I was born my grandparents were already older than most grandparents. My Grandma Rose had heart problems for years. She had her first open heart surgery a couple years before I was even born. I remember she would always take great care of herself. She would walk around the mall all the time, if she couldn’t get to the mall, she would walk laps around her house. She also always ate a heart healthy diet, not a lot of red meat and took her medicines. She must have done something right because she went sixteen years without another open heart surgery when the normal time frame is ten years.

She ended up with Alzheimer’s disease so she was unable to care for herself in the same way as before. It was extremely hard because she was such an amazing woman. We had to make sure she got exercise and took her medicine and watch her diet for her.  No one minded though because she always took such great care of all of us.  After her Alzheimer’s progressed, it became too hard to care for her ourselves. We had to seek out help by looking for a nursing home as she needed more medical help. I come from a family of teachers, none of us are in the medical field.  Thankfully we found a great one for her to go to. It was also close by so I could go visit her all the time, we were extremely close.  I am so glad there is BestNursingHomes.com to help educate those who we trust our loved ones with. BestNursingHomes.com is run by the Association of Skilled Nursing Providers (ASNP) a non-profit organization dedicated to educating the public about skilled nursing care.

Here is a quote about BestNursingHomes.com:

 
 “We are very grateful for the leadership of John Sorensen in the post-acute care industry. John is a leader in his field, a generous philanthropist, and a great example of someone who places serving the patient above anything else. We are proud to be associated with John and North American Health Care and grateful for his support to promote best practices in skilled nursing.” – Amy Osmond Cook, Ph.D., Executive Director of the Association for Skilled Nursing Providers

You can do lots of things to get your loved ones moving and healthy:

Go for walks together, if the weather is bad, walk around a mall or even around the house.

Take them shopping with you, have them help push the cart for exercise and the cart will give them some support.

Go to parks and walk trails and have some fun on the swings.

Park a little further away to get exercise when going to the store.

There are also many activities at senior centers that they can enjoy and make some new friends.

Make sure they are going to the doctor regularly and are getting preventive tests like colonoscopies and stress tests.

Monitor medicines and make sure they have everything they need for the month

Cook together and make healthy meals that they can just heat up from the freezer. Sometimes cooking isn’t as fun when you are just cooking for one and people tend to go to fast food and other processed foods.

The most important thing is to be there and spend time with them. Family and friends being there can have an impact on how healthy you are. Remember that emotional health is also really important.

 Get them involved in clubs and groups based on their interests so they are making friends and socializing.

I know today is National Senior Health & Fitness  Day but it also reminds me to take better care of myself even though I am only 33. Time goes by so fast and if I make changes now, it will be easier as I get older.

Moments of Life

When your loved one is really sick it’s heartbreaking. It’s even more heartbreaking when they have to go in to hospice. When my Grandma Rose was diagnosed with Congestive Heart Failure, we knew that it was time to say our good byes. My Grandma Rose had many heart problems. She had two open heart surgeries sixteen years apart. My grandma was 88 years old. She also had Alzheimer’s disease. Her health had been declining over the last few years of her life. She was in the hospital on and off. We knew that she would need hospice care. She was in assisted living before she went to the hospital but with the new diagnosis and her age, there wasn’t really much the doctors could do. My Grandma Rose was a very strong person. She was a fighter. There were times that we were told by her doctors to say good bye before surgeries. She always made it out unscathed. My family felt comfort knowing that since she was in hospice that she would be taken care of and made comfortable. My Grandma lived such an amazing life. She had a loving husband, a great family, many friends and she helped anyone she could. We knew we weren’t giving up, we were just making the last days of her life the best they could be.

You sometimes know when it’s time for them to go to Heaven. As much as you don’t want it to happen, it does.  She had family visiting with her every day. She needed medical care but, being in the hospital wasn’t something she liked. Being in the hospital was not ideal, it would have been too heartbreaking and difficult for her to be at a family member’s home, because she needed extra care that we weren’t trained to do.  It was challenging with her Alzheimer’s, because she didn’t know what was going on at all. We made sure to find a great hospice program for her. It was affiliated with the catholic hospital which is important to my Grandma Rose. Her faith was number one.

I will never forget the last time I saw my Grandma Rose. It was so hard for me because she was my best friend. When it was time for me to leave, I said I love you Grandma. She said I love you more. That was our special thing that we had been doing for years. I feel like God gave me a special gift because it was like there was no Alzheimer’s disease. There was no who are you or what am I doing here? It was just us. As soon as I walked out of the room, I started bawling. It was such a hard and sad moment and on the other hand something that I hold very dear to my heart. She was able to be herself to every family member that day.  I knew she was in good hands. The day my grandma passed away, we knew that she was probably going to heaven that night. I decided not to be there when it happened. I was not taking this well. My mom and aunt were holding her hands when she took her last breath. My mom called me and there was an ocean of tears.

Sometimes when your loved one goes in to hospice, they still have a whole lot of living to do. There isn’t a time limit for them. There is no expiration date stamp. There is a misconception with hospice as giving up, it's not though.  Hospice can enrich their lives. They can learn new skills and be always greeted with a smile. Sometimes in the hospital, the staff doesn’t always have a smile on their faces. People who work in hospice want to be there. They have a passion for their patients. Many times being at home is not possible without medical training.  Most people hate to be in the hospital or even visit them. With hospice it’s like home with many caring people by their side. 

Moments of Life

The goal of Moments of Life: Made Possible by Hospice is to educate the public about the choices we all have when facing a life-limiting illness, and how choosing hospice is not ‘giving up.

 

Optum

Optum is a leading information and technology-enabled health services business dedicated to helping make the health system work better for everyone. With more than 50,000 people worldwide, Optum delivers intelligent, integrated solutions that help to modernize the health system and improve overall population health, including palliative and hospice care for

   

For more information on what to expect from hospice check out Moments of Life.

Must Have Tips for Caregivers and Finding them too.

My Grandma Rose was an amazing woman. She always had heart problems. She had her first bypass surgery in 1979, and didn’t have another one for sixteen years. You are only supposed to go ten. She was very independent and strong. My grandpa passed away in 1993 and she lived alone for seven years.  She always had visitors, especially me.  We were best friends. I would go to visit her almost every other weekend, even when I was older.  We always had a great time.  I would go everywhere with her, even when she was an honorary pall bearer at a funeral for a fellow Catholic Daughter. Eventually she had Alzheimer’s disease, and could no longer live without someone around.  I moved in with her for a while to make sure she took her medicine, ate, and that she didn’t wander off. My aunt lived close by too, in case she needed anything.  It was very hard for everyone involved. It was hard because you have to watch someone you love deteriorate mentally.  We had become her caregivers. Genworth has a great article about how the caregiver’s lives are rerouted and all the changes you have to make.CNN reports a growing trend of people caring for aging parents or in this case, grandparents. I know that as one of the main caregivers, I wasn’t able to work outside of the home and I had to spend less time with friends. At the beginning I even moved away from everyone to be there for her.I knew that it was the most important thing for me to do at the time.

She was in an assisted living place for a while; we had some concerns about other residents being rough with my grandma. We took her out of there. We heard on the news a woman in her unit was able to escape and froze to death in their courtyard.  This was after she moved in with us. We continued to take care of her; I would make sure she had whatever she needed while my mom was at work. It was a full time job. I didn’t mind because this was my best friend and she took care of me when I was little. We kept her with us as long as we could until her health started to deteriorate, and she needed to be in a nursing home. No one in our family had medical training, and was such a hard decision. We visited her and took her out all the time; she was only fifteen minutes away from us.  At this point it was extremely hard; we would bring her over for holidays and she wouldn’t know who we were or where she was.  In 2005, she had congestive heart failure and just was her time to go.  We all received a gift the last few days, she was able to remember everyone and tell them things only she would know to say.  I would do it all over again if I could just see her and give her a million hugs. I think about her every single day.

Being a caregiver is hard work but it is worth it.  My family took care of my grandma for years. It was definitely a group effort.  You really need a great support system.  I am thankful that everyone was there and could help in some way.  Sometimes, family care isn’t an option, it is very important to find someone qualified to take care of your loved one.  It is tough to know what to look for. There are tools and articles from companies like Genworth that can help you find out more information.  I would recommend researching the caregiver or the facility.  Make sure they are licensed. I know that you can usually find health department records and see if they have had any violations. If they aren’t online, you can call the health department and ask them as the records are public. Look for reviews of the facility. Use search engines and learn as much as you can about the caregiver or facility. If you are using an in home caregiver, have them do a criminal background check and drug tests.  Many states have online court records, if they are available, search court records.  Again it is public records.  By searching court records you get things that may not be criminal but could raise a red flag. I know I wouldn’t want someone who has been sued a lot to be responsible for my loved one.  

Thankfully Genworth has a tool that can help you find caregivers in your area, so you can avoid Craigslist to find a caregiver.

Stay away from places like Craigslist when looking.  I am leery about a total stranger taking care of a family member that answers an online advertisement. Who knows if they know what they are doing or properly trained? I would try and find an agency that has well trained, professional workers that are really passionate about taking care of people.  I hope these tips help you if you ever need a caregiver for a loved one.

This post was inspired by Genworth and Brandfluential. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Nursing Home Safety Precautions

I was thinking about different ways to keep people that are in nursing homes safe. There was a tragedy that happened shortly after my grandma left an assisted living home to live with us for a while. This happened a couple weeks after my grandma left, in winter a woman went outside and froze to death. It was a terrible thing to happen. I still feel really bad for the family even now, many years later. I was thinking what if nursing homes bought an id badge printer and made ID cards for the patients? There are many benefits for doing this. It would help with the high amount of turnaround with employees knowing the patient by name. It would also help when it is time for meds for the patients and making sure the right person gets the right medications.

As a granddaughter of a woman who had Alzheimer’s I think it would also help those patients remember their names as well. I think for privacy reasons it should be the first name initial on the badge. You could even go as far as putting the patients and residents names in a certain color if they didn’t have permission to leave alone for safety reasons which would be great if it is a big building. It would also help knowing who belongs there and who is just visiting.

I think it is important to have some kind of protection for the residents that a stranger couldn’t be able to walk off the streets and victimize the patients. I don’t know how many times I went to visit my grandma and I was able to walk right in the facility and wasn’t asked who I was or who I was coming to see. Sure they have a sign in book but I think there should be an extra precaution in place. Of course there should always be a person at the front desk to protect our loved ones from strangers that have no business walking in.

Another idea would be that they have HID proximity cards for family members that visit. The family members could just swipe their card and gain access to the building or better yet, for families that have a loved one in a more secured location. I forgot the code to gain access to where my Grandma Rose was living because she was in a secure area. I wrote the number down many times and even tried to remember it with a mnemonic device and I never remembered it. There would be times we couldn’t leave because we forgot the code to the elevator and we had to hunt down an employee. I know that safety for our loved ones is very important especially those that are already fragile.