On July 4, I left on my trip to California and left my sister in charge of mom and her health issues. When I left, we knew she would be going to a nursing home, but we didn't know when or which one. So as I'm winding through the mountains in Arizona and California, my sister is winding hr way through the paperwork needed to get my mother placed in a nursing home.
My mom has nothing but her Social Security check, so the paperwork does simplify when “poor”. But that wasn't the hardest part. That was finding a nursing home.
Senior living, assisted living and nursing homes have all sorts of acronyms on who they will take. The best ones are “private pay”--they don't take Medicare or Medicaid patients so they pick and choose who they take and how much work there will be. They are usually better staffed(but not necessarily so) because they charge the insurance companies and patients. This is the type of situations that Long Term Insurance pay and also any and all finances that the senior may have. We didn't bother looking into these nursing homes.
I even knew the nursing homes on the NFW! list(No F*&%!ng Way), there are many of them in Joliet as well as other towns. These are the ones that normally are largely state subsidized and have a minimal level of care. They are usually underfunded and under staffed, we've probably all heard the horror stories of these.
And then there are the ones in the middle, like the nursing home attached to St. Joe's Hospital which my mother was at. Now, this one requires you to make an appointment, 24 hours in advance to check it out, will only allow you at certain hours without an appointment—not when you want to come, not something you want to hear when trying to place your mother! Before my sister actually made an appointment, she found out some other information from people who had family at this nursing home and said not interested.
So....there's Lakewood in Plainfield. Our great uncle had been placed there in the 90's and it seemed to be a decent place. Sister went and interviewed, toured the place, submitted request through there and Medicare/Medicaid and mom was no longer homeless. Due to the constraints on Medicare, she could not keep her apartment and get placed in a nursing home. Also, the nursing home receives all but $30 of her Social Security check to pay for the nursing home which doesn't leave much for her living expenses so if she is released from nursing care, we have to find her another place to live.
Lakewood, is ok. Just ok. Although the staff is good, and attentive, there aren't enough of them. This means that patients might have to wait. It also means that sometimes the midnight staff wake my mom up at 5 or 5:30 a.m. to take a bath cuz they have to get 6 rooms cleaned before the day shift comes in. What do the patients then do? Sit around until breakfast gets there at 7:30 or 8...in other words, not much! This is the nature of the “beast”. That and because my mother is on the “medicare” ward, that means they are only receiving about $1100 a month to care for her(that's about what she received from Social Security—I don't know what type of reimbursement they receive from the state and federal gov't.), there are limited beds and she gets moved around a lot...what's a lot? She was placed there the second week in July and has been moved 4 times.
Because of some of these shortcomings, we try to make sure that one of us is with her during the day, we can make sure she's cared for, she gets her meds on time(which can sometimes be a problem due to the nurses are also responsible for the intake interviews of new patients instead of having other staff handle the paperwork) and that if she's uncomfortable, we can hurry things along.
Then there is also transportation to her chemo and radiation appointments. That is done by an ambulance company in the area and usually she gets the medvan—this can be used with her wheel chair rather than the full blown ambulance. But this costs her about $65 per ride...and she has one appointment for chemo weekly and 5 for radiation...$30 a month for expenses just doesn't go too far, does it? We think we've got it covered now under the Medi-plans, but not certain.
“Growing old ain't for sissies”...or those that have no family or friends to fight the health care system.
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