Memory Care

I've known this day was coming but I had hoped it wouldn't come so quickly.

Earlier this week, we learned a spot had opened up in the "memory care" unit at Maristone.  My mom is first on the waiting list, so we have a decision to make.

Memory Care is a smaller part of the facility where 12 residents live with 3 caregivers on duty at all times.  The apartments are smaller and the residents can't come and go as they please.  There are organized group activities.  The residents have their meals in a common area there, as opposed to the dining hall.

I've struggled with the idea of her moving to an apartment in the Memory Care unit.  What little freedom and independence she has will be gone or so it seems to me.  She won't have all of her stuff in her apartment, like she does now (although maybe that's a good thing).  It's also a tacit admission, I think, that the disease is winning, as I knew it would, and that the end is nearer.  That's really hard for me to accept.

On a personal level, I don't think the visits will be as tranquil and peaceful for me.  There won't be as much space and I'm not sure we'll be able to sit and visit quietly, as we so often do.  As my sister, Tracy, said yesterday in one of our regular telephone calls, moving mom to the Memory Care unit will be probably be better for her and harder for us.  As I pondered the dilemma yesterday afternoon, I was reminded that it's not about me, it's about my mom.

On the positive side, she will undoubtedly be safer in Memory Care.  We won't have to worry about someone checking on her every 2 hours, which I don't think happens regularly.  She will be monitored more closely, so it's less likely visitors - like my in-laws, Jane and Jim White earlier this week - will find her in her wheelchair, wedged between her chair and the door, facing the wall and not sure how she got there or how long she's been there.  In other words, hopefully there will be fewer of those heartbreaking moments we know about, not to mention the ones we don't know about.

Theoretically there is less of a chance of a bad fall, or so we hope.  Multiple visitors to her apartment, including me, have arrived to find her walking from the bathroom, stooped over, without her walker or wheelchair.  Many times when I arrive, I find her in her chair with the walker and wheelchair against the wall across the room.  As hard as we try to help her remember, she forgets and somehow gets out of her chair and walks across the room to her walker or wheelchair if she uses them at all.

The bottom line for me, I guess, is that it's better to move her too soon rather than too late.  If falls and breaks a hip and has to undergo surgery, it's a game changer.  Or, more likely, game over.  What's left of the game, anyway.

Lastly, one of the nuggets of wisdom - if you can call it that - I try to pass on to my clients is that if you're hearing the same thing from several people you trust, it's probably true.  My mom's close friend, Patti Sparks, my mother-in-law, my sister, and the physical and occupational therapists who see my mom at Maristone all recommend we move her to the Memory Care unit.  So, I guess we will.

There is nothing easy about Alzheimer's disease.  Nothing.  And this decision is no different.