RAV phone

Cocoandcoop

My husband can not work the simple Jitterbug phone any longer and I am thinking of getting him a RAV phone. They are $ but I need something for him in case of emergency. Does anyone have any experience with these - good or bad? Thank you

BPS

I don't know about the RAV phone, but I asked my wife to make a call over a year ago and she picked up the TV remote that was on the same table and just looked at it not knowing what to do. She knows what a phone and a tv remote are but has no longer has any idea how to use either one of them.

Carl46

I question whether a person who can no longer operate his phone can be safely left alone. Would he even recognize an emergency requiring a phone call?

SDianeL

I wouldn’t spend the money for a phone. He won’t be able to use it. I even got my DH a landline phone with picture buttons and he couldn’t use it. If he’s at the point he can’t use the phone he wouldn’t know what to do in an emergency anyway. You can confirm that by asking him what he would if a fire broke out. The nurse asked my husband that question and my husband said he would try to put out the fire. Not call 911 or get out himself. I was shocked. She said he could no longer be left alone. If you need something for emergencies alert buttons that you wear will automatically dial if you fall but even then your DH wouldn’t know to push the button even if he would wear the device (my husband wouldn’t). I got one to use in case something happened to me.

harshedbuzz

@Cocoandcoop

I'd save your money. The way dementia works, short-term and working memory are most impaired. Beyond that, longer-term memory seems to fade in a LIFO manner. This means, your LO doesn't have the skills needed to learn something new. He might have the "muscle memory" for an old school landline but if it's been a while, probably not.

Mom tried to help dad by getting a simpler flip phone and later a simpler TV remote. Both failed miserably.

Touching on what Carl said, would DH recognize an emergency? Mom was seriously in denial about dad's abilities— he was freakishly verbal, so she fooled herself into thinking she didn't need to bring in the caregivers who were expensive and annoyed dad.

She asked me to come over to be available to the techs installing her new HVAC system. She didn't want dad interfering given his impaired spatial reasoning. While there, they triggered the smoke detector. They'd warned us a minute before that this would happen. When the alarms went off, dad sat for a minute and then asked what the noise was. I said "smoke detectors". He sat for another 20 seconds before he slowly toddled off telling me he needed to tell mom. As he stood, his phone dropped to the floor and at no point did he call 911 or tell me to. IN a real fire, he'd have died.

HB

GothicGremlin

I looked into the RAV phone for my sister, but ultimately decided against it. At that time, I knew her phone days were numbered, but she wanted her phone - probably because she knew she always used to use it, even though she had a tenuous understanding of it by that point.

And @Cocoandcoop I don't know where your husband is in his ability to use a phone, but I know that when my sister was at stage 5 the phone became a ball of stress for her. She couldn't always make it work, or she'd call me 30 times in one day (I'm not making this up), so I finally made the phone disappear. I told her it was broken and I needed to take it into the shop for repairs. When she'd ask about it, I'd tell her they were waiting for a part. Repeat as needed. Eventually she forgot all about it.

I'm positive she wouldn't have been able to make an emergency call, so that's something to think about as well.