Blog – Update On My Mom

I am back from Spokane and trying to help my mother as she is slowly sinking into deeper Dementia and Parkinson’s disease. Clearly, time is quite short. Her downturn since June has been quite pronounced. Since her hospital stay the end of September, she keeps falling and not realizing that she needs her walker. Because of that short term memory loss, she has broken her back once again. This time her low back during another fall.

I called in hospice for an evaluation but she does not qualify at this time. Which was a surprise to me because she is clearly failing on all levels. But my mother has always been able to pull things together for short periods of time and once again, during the interview/evaluation she was all bubbly and positive. She just loves an audience and attention. She would say things like, “Oh I can walk! I can go to the bathroom myself! I can take a shower myself!”

While I am correcting her say, “Mom! No! You can’t!”

On one level perhaps it is good that she is so delusional that she believes she is in better shape than she is. But in her evaluation, she did not yet qualify for hospice. Seems one of the considerations is that she would only be able to speak 6 words!

Well, that is not going to happen with my mother. She will be talking to the very end if she has anything to say about it.

On one level it is aggravating as she is clearly slipping very quickly. I wanted to have more help and companionship for her. She fears being alone. And while she is in memory care in Spokane and they check on her often, she is wildly hallucinating, and at times very confused an agitated.

I fear we are going to have to have another major fall such as breaking of the hip before anything in the medical systems might jump in more to help her.

I have to say I am very frustrated with how our medical systems are working. Clearly, medical staff is underpaid and overworked while the insurance companies are making record profits for their CEO’s and the stockholders. Something is so very wrong with this system. It should be illegal to do this to people who obviously need care.

The system is more than willing to allow my mother’s retirement to pay out tens of thousands of dollars each month for her care without helping out at all.

I just hope that when I get to this place there are other options available to me.

I am grateful that Lewy-Body Dementia is not hereditary. It looks like no fun at all.

~Suzanne Wagner~