re: #213 wrenchwench

Me, this morning:

‘I wish there was some way to prepare for the phone call where my stepmother wants me to convince my father that he has to stay in the nursing home and can’t go home.’

Mr. w:

‘Is your phone charged?’

He’s so practical. My phone is charged.

The year my father died at the age of 90, he called me from his 3rd nursing home and begged me to come take him home. This nursing home was a private house in the neighborhood with a live-in male RN as owner and manager, his wife and two teenagers, and just 4 other patients. I helped him move in, a nice well run place by a family who cared.

In the phone conversation, I had to tell my father that he had to stay in the nursing home because he kept refusing to allow nursing assistants to care for him at home. He was insistent his 85 year old retired RN wife, my mother, be his care taker. She had done it for 5 years, with a hospital bed on ground floor of their house, empty the foley bag, change the bed, and other such duties.

I would stay with him, so mom could travel from time to time. When I asked what decisions I should make if something critical happened while she was gone, she pointed to my father’s doctor’s order posted on the wall, “No extreme measures.” “Show that to the paramedics.”

He wasn’t afraid of dying. He would joke that if he died and went to hell, he would just talk about Bob Dole with the devil. “Probably see Bob Dole down there too.” He thought Bob Dole would see the humor in that as well.

I just had to explain to him that if he continued to stay at home, it would cause an earlier death of mom, and then he would die as well. So staying in the nursing home was best for both of them.

Don’t know what else to say that might help you.