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.

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:

To people with dementia, home is a feeling not a physical place. Many people cared for in the home they have lived in for decades say they want to go home. It’s caused by anxiety. Tell her she can go home when the doctor says so, then change the subject. Let all calls go to voicemail and call her once a day.

@kscott14537

For this purpose, the burner phone is a phone number that you use only for your loved one. You input the number into your loved one’s contacts in place of your normal phone number. Yiu put it on silent so you don’t hear it ring if you are busy. You program a special recorded message on it for them to hear when they call. Something that will ease their anxiety if you don’t answer. Then you can call them back at a time more convenient for you. After you get off work for example. This helps manage the -7-8-9 phone calls a day that some dementia patients make to their person.

I didn’t use a burner phone but I tried to only answer my mom’s calls twice daily. It didn’t always work out as she often just left increasingly emotional messages over and over a few minutes apart. She couldn’t understand that I wasn’t available 24/7.