2018 Sunday — End of Life Living

Today Mr. Fun & I toured five convalescent facilities looking for a place for his 95-year-old mom, Grammie Fun, to live for the remaining days of her life. Since the end of December she has fallen four times. Two of those times she spent 12+ hours on the floor before someone found her because she did not have her phone with her.

The last time she fell and spent 12+ hours on the bathroom floor was Saturday night/Sunday morning Feb. 24/25. When Mr. Fun reported this to Grammie’s doctor the following Monday, he sent two home-health people to Grammie’s house to check on her on Tuesday. They reported the falling incidents to the County Office of Aging and the County threatened Mr. Fun with the fact that he could be charged with neglect. This is crazy when considering that Mr. Fun’s mom refuses to let anyone live with her and is adamant that she is not leaving her home to live anywhere else.

Because Mr. Fun has been told that almost all care facilities have converted from long-term/end-of-life care to rehabilitation facilities, I wanted to go see today what’s really available. Mr. Fun would just believe what he’s been told. Well, what we discovered is that most of the places only provide long-term care to a small percentage of their beds. Everything else is focused on rehabilitation. I think convalescent homes are becoming a thing of the past. I am shocked and appalled! And I am wondering what the baby-boomers are going to do as they age-out of their own homes.

The cost to have a bed in one of these facilities, and some are three beds to a room, is extremely expensive, like $6,000+ a month. Grammie Fun will have to pay this from her own finances because her medical care provider, Kaiser Medical, is going to put her on hospice and then all of her Medicare pays to cover the hospice care and not for her room at a facility. Something about this seems a little crocked to me. So her home needs to be sold to afford this. Meantime, we have to pay the fees. I am extremely stressed because we don’t have an extra $6,000 to spend every month on these expenses.

This story has many more paragraphs, but for now this is enough.

Rosie (& Mr. Fun), aka Carol