The principle: “If your parents don´t pass away young in life you are going to watch them age”. Aging is part of life, after working hard raising you, they can enjoy and spoil your kids.
We have to take into account that when our parents age, at some point, they will be needing our assistance in daily tasks. Little by little you will find yourself as a full-time caregiver for an elderly person.
For most people the caregiver task comes suddenly. In most cases, it happens after one of the spouses have passed away and their needs come from their loss. Knowing your life-time partner is gone is like the loss of a limb and it is even more difficult to overcome. At this point your preocupation for them will increase enormously and it is now you must choose ‘home care’ or ‘care home’.
It might seem weird but the more you get used to the idea of provinding your loved one with a caregiver (this will help everyone involved in the situation – family, friends, coworkers) it will help you by knowing that the time when your loved one completely depends on you has been delayed.
Think about the things you can do to make your parents house more accessible and safe for them. These following tips are examples of what you can do to be ready for home care:
- Try to keep everything they might need in one level, their bedroom, kitchen, laundry, living room, etc. Stairs can be dangerous for elderly people.
- Help them with them daily tasks. Find out stores that would deliver their products (supermarkets, pharmacies, etc.) another good idea is to hire a company that would come in for few hours a week and help them with the cleaning.
- Health care professional companies would come around to check or prescribe medication your parents might need.
- Getting easy access to things is important. Reorganizing the kitchen is the next step. Things that are frequently used should be on an eye level so they can find and reach them easily. All the appliances should also be easy-to-use, i.e., if you get them a high tech oven, they might have some troubles gitting it to work.
- Make their house easy to use. Make sure there is plenty of light for what they need to do. They might need extra support for walking around the house, walking and grab bars along the hall or bathtub could be a good idea to have.
- Emergency pull ropes are a handy thing to have around the house. By pulling them, an alarm is set off, that could let you know if there is an emergency.
By helping them and providing home care, to live in a much safer and easy-to-get-around environment, you are delaying the time when they would have to move into a retirement home because you are helping them to be independent for a longer time.
Tags: caregiver, devon, home care, main line, malvern, paoli
