WOW

Okay so it's now 5:05am we have been up and to the potty chair every 30-40 minutes since 9:30pm. It takes about 11 minutes from start to finish, getting her off the bed, pjs and panties down and on the pot then the reverse.  Most of the time she just sits on the chair and looks around the room, yawns a couple of times and then says she is finished. Talk about frustrating. I am pretty certain this is what my sister and her husband had been going through for the past month.  I advised her when I first heard about it to check with the doctors about getting her some care and we placed her in Manor Care in Spokane and unfortunately the place did not have a very high quality of care. The air was broken and she smelled of urine when my sister came and visited, so she took her out. I definitely will get some sort of home care nurse or someone that can do the overnight shift and is awake during that shift so that no matter how many times she needs to get up in the night it really doesn't matter because they will be awake anyway. It really is a two shift job. one caregiver at night say from 8-8 then the other from 8am-8pm and because it is a 12 hour shift you will have to actually have 4 people to split the week to do it effectively. I know that Kim is checking into another service and hopefully we can find one that can do the job. The first company we used the owner did the first night and although she was pleasant both in nature and in looks she admitted that the job was too difficult for her and she would be bringing a new nurse by to do an introduction. The person that came was all of 4 feet tall and although she attempted to sell herself to me was never able to demonstrate, using my Mom’s best friend as a guinea pig, that she could do the job. It takes strength and patience to the job right and quite possibly a man’s touch. At my sister’s I know that the duty fell mostly on my sister’s husband. I could easily handle one of the shifts no problem but it is like a job that require you to sleep at the end of the shift in order to do it full time. Quite frankly, I am not sure what we are going to do. In the evening before I allowed her to get back in her bed and sleep. (I was trying to get her back on days) We had my grandmother attempt to try and get mymom off the potty chair and into the bed. My uncle and I spotted my mom and my grandmother quickly realized what we had been telling her all along that there was no way she could do it. She was only able to get my mom about an inch off the chair and then gave up. My grandmother is 85, stubborn and the matriarch of our family so I felt that the hands on approach would be best, and it was. I do think that it would seem that the best place from mom would be her at her mother’s so that she can see her face and get a hug and talk with her, but I do not know how long this can go on without a decent caregiver and a decision will have to be made. Really the crappy part is, as is most of the urgent matters in anyone’s life, that the root of the issue is money. I mean let’s face it, if we had a pile of cash then we could get a decent highly qualified caregiver system in place and we could easily keep her here as long as we wanted but alas, my paycheck to paycheck budget cannot muster such a thing and so we rely on Mom’s half of the equity in my grandmother’s house to get what we can get. I hope we catch a lucky break tomorrow and Laura the owner of the company brings us the perfect caregiver. Signing off for now…