This week in Crisis Corner, “I want to stay/keep them at home as long as possible.”
Just about everyone wants to stay at home or keep their loved one at home “for as long as possible” before moving to a care facility. In many cases, with enough planning and family support, it is possible for someone to remain in their home until they take their last breath. However, even in the best circumstances it takes a lot of effort and must be approached from the starting place of staying home for the long haul, not for as long as possible.
Staying home for as long as possible means that you have already decided that, at some point, staying home will not be an option. In most cases, if we are truly honest with ourselves, those who want to keep themselves at home as long as possible are really saying that they are afraid of making the change and those who want to keep a loved one home as long as possible are really trying to avoid feeling guilty about “putting them in a home.” If you know that staying home will not be an option, and you are willing to face the fear of the unknown or the guilt of making the hard choice; then there are many reasons to start the transition to a new place sooner than later.
First and foremost, this discussion typically starts with someone receiving a diagnosis of dementia or Alzheimer’s. Healthy people rarely talk about staying home as long as possible, they either talk about staying home or they talk about finding a retirement community. We cannot count the number of times that we have heard “I’ll keep him home until he is so confused that it does not matter where he is living” or “When she doesn’t recognize me anymore, then I’ll take her to a facility.” The problem with that line of thinking is that people with dementia and Alzheimer’s tend to have better long-term memory than short-term. They have spent years and years ingraining the layout of their house and their things in their minds. If they move to a new home early in the progression of their illness, they have more opportunity to form new memories and patterns. Moving them to a new home when they are not forming any sort of new memories and are already confused all of the time is much harder for them. They are more likely to have trips and falls, especially at night, as they try to navigate an unfamiliar room based on patterns that they walked in the old home. They are also likely to become even more confused and/or depressed. Many studies have shown that changing the place where a person with dementia or Alzheimer’s lives has a negative effect on their health and can make their condition progress even faster. The further they are into the illness, the greater this negative effect becomes.
Second, most care facilities, other than nursing homes, will not accept Medicaid without being paid privately for a period, typically 2-4 years. This means that if someone is receiving Medicaid benefits at home and then needs to move to a facility, they will likely either have to move to a nursing home or find a way to private pay and then reapply for benefits. There are a few adult family homes and assisted living facilities that will take Medicaid without a private pay period, but they are increasingly hard to find and many of them are not places that you would want to live or to have a loved one living.
Even if Medicaid is not yet involved, the cost for most care facilities increases as the needs of the resident increases. Moving yourself or your loved one into a facility early after the diagnosis rather than after a few years could mean the difference between paying $5,000 per month during the private pay period and paying $9,000 per month during the private pay period. If you have to pay privately for two or more years, then you want those to be the years when you need the lowest levels of care.
Finally, you need to consider the health of the rest of the family that is providing care. It is hard work to care for someone 24 hours per day. Even when professionals are hired to come into the home and help, it is hard for family members, especially spouse’s, to really back off and let others be the care givers. They often change from spouses to nurses and the effect is visible. Many couples come to us for help with planning for one ill spouse only to have the “healthy” one pass first because they are working themselves to death. We have seen clients lose 50 pounds, which they did not have to lose, over the course of six months working with them, not to mention the ones who have strokes or break a hip trying to assist with a transfer. In those situations, not only has the healthy spouse thrown away their own health, but they have created a situation where the ill spouse has no one available to provide care and they are forced to move to a facility on short notice with no thought or planning into where they will go.
If your plan is that you or your loved one will take their last breath at home, great; we can help make that happen. If your plan is try for as long as you can and then make the move, please read through this one more time and decide if you are making the best plan for the person who needs care or the best plan for avoiding a sense of fear or guilt for yourself. There truly are great care facilities out there and we can help you form a plan that is best for you and your loved ones.
