Mom and assisted living

Hugs!🫂

You will soon come to the harsh realization that some of those calls MUST be sent to vm, to help preserve your mental health.

@Suzabata

It sounds like it's early days at the AL for her. Most PWD take around 6-12 to settle into their new AL when coming from home. The burner phone is a great idea. Otherwise, you can let calls go to voicemail and call back when you're up for it.

Kudos to you guys for finding a place that allows her to keep her dog. That said, if this is a hospitality model AL rather than a higher acuity AL for MC/MCF, the problem might be that she isn't appropriately placed. A cousin placed her mom in an AL when she was really too impaired to be at that level of care. She missed meals, the other ladies soon realized she couldn't keep up with their conversations or activities and she ended up actively shunned by the resident mean-girls. Sometimes when a family is ready to accept AL, that cruise has already departed and their LO already needs MC.

HB

Hi Suzabata,

It's all driven by the disease blocking her ability to retain new information, and there's not much you can do about that. Sometimes you can find a reason for why they're in a new place that resonates with them and it sticks in their memory with enough repetition. My mom accepted her move to MC because we told her the doctor ordered her to do inpatient rehab. Since your mom can no longer imprint events into her memory it's as if they've never happened. That extends to recognizing the environment around her—it takes a lot of repetition for the brain to be able to work around the disease and imprint a new environment or routine. It's likely seeing a phone makes her want to call to find out why she's in some new place. The burner phone will work great. I'd say it took my Mom (stage 4/early 5) about three weerks to start to know the routines in the locked door AL, about 6-9 to get comfortable. She was okay there until her physical needs accelerated, and at that point it became very clear that, contrary to what they had told us, the facility expected us to provide aides to assist—they reserved their memory care for the late stage residents as well, and had become so understaffed that they couldn't provide basic services like room cleans, so it was time to move on. I wish I would have been able to get her into the MC she ended up at much sooner, but at least by pretending she would have her own 'apartment' we could get her to make the initial move.

I always say this, because it made such a difference for my mom: Consider seeing if her healthcare provider could prescribe or adjust some mild anti-anxiety med to help her through this transition. My mom's AL never would follow through, the MC did immediately, and it was like night and day in terms of Mom's peace of mind, without making her groggy.

This helped me: