Lifted from my New Blog...

It's been a crappy week. I started a new blog to help make myself feel better. Here is the entry I just posted there:

My grandmother passed away this morning. She was 90, suffering from dementia and her health had declined rapidly in the last few months. She lived in a nursing home in the Bronx and when I got the call, I wrestled with whether or not I could possibly make it down to the nursing home and back before the craziness that is rush hour in New York City on New Year's Eve hit. After meeting with the funeral director, it won't happen and I feel incredibly guilty about it. Then I found this which made me feel a little better:

"Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending."
~ Carl Bard

Best wishes for a happy, healthy and prosperous 2011 :-)

Grandma Gets the Shaft

I try to visit my grandmother at least once a month in the Bronx nursing home where she's now been for two years since being diagnosed with dementia. I know the nursing staff, they know me and someone always has some (usually) funny story to tell me about Grandma's exploits when I arrive.

But last Sunday was different. Two of my aunts, my son and I arrived only to find that she had been moved to another building in the facility FIVE DAYS earlier. The move changed all that had become routine and familiar over the last two years for her, including her doctors and nurses, her social worker, her room and roommate. And to make matters worse, no one from the facility even bothered to call and let me - listed as the family contact person on every record they have - know what the heck was going on.

Steamed, I called the administrative office first thing Monday morning to find out who would now be the contact on the nursing home's end if the family had questions or concerns. The new social worker was not in at 9:15am, so I left a message. I left another at 11am and was about to leave yet another at 11:30am when she finally answered her phone. Her weak apology over how their lack of contact forced our visit to begin like a wild goose chase did little to make me feel better. And that she just didn't get that bothered me even more.

The nursing home is over an hour away. The main reason I haven't transfered my grandmother closer is because she seemed comfortable and had developed a routine and good relationship with her roommate. Convenience for me didn't seem like enough of a reason to cause her any undue stress. But not only has that apple cart now been upset, nobody thought it important enough to notify the family about what was going on or why it was necessary. Does it really seem like her best interests are even a concern?

I asked the social worker about the procedure for having Grandma moved to another nursing home and found out the leg work will be on me as far as finding one in our area that takes Medicaid and that has a space for her. I just have to call her with the info when I find one, Ms. Social Worker said. I wanted to reach through the phone, grab her by the collar and shake the spit our of her mouth for all the help she offered. Instead, I thanked her and hung up.

This crap is so overwhelming it isn't even funny.

My Visit to See Grandma

My grandmother will be 88 next month. She's spent the last 18 months in a nursing home in the Bronx after being diagnosed with dementia. Fiercely independent, she'd lived alone in the same a one-bedroom apartment in Harlem for over 50 years.

Last week, I got a call from her doctor that she'd fallen out of bed and broken her forearm. She had to be taken to a nearby hospital for x-rays and returned to the nursing home two days later. Today I finally got down to visit and she looked incredibly small and frail. Her speech is getting worse (she mumbles most everything she says) and she just seems to have lost her spunk. I don't know what to do with that.

My house is exactly 70 miles away from the nursing home. I'm only able to get down to visit about once a month. She's always happy to see me (although she calls me by my mother's name), but I really don't know much about her day-to-day in the hours I'm not there. Her best buddy is her roommate, Ms. Nancy, whose house my grandmother thought for the longest time she was actually staying in. I've thought about moving grandma to a nursing home upstate, but because she had adjusted and seemed comfortable, it didn't seem necessary. But now Ms. Nancy is in the hospital and has been for about a month and my grandmother just doesn't seem to be thriving like before.

Dementia is such an ugly thing, robbing its victims of their memories and even their words. I hate most that it seems to make its victims complacent; my grandmother and most of the other people on her floor seem totally oblivious to the lives they had before they had to pack up and move everything into a 10' x 20' room.

So what will the next visit be like? How long will it be before she no longer knows my son's name or even remembers me? Perhaps this is scarier for us - the family that knew her well before the brain synapses began to fail - than it is for her. We can kind of guess at what is coming. She has no idea...