Hi,
My 72yo mom is in an Assisted Living Facility in Texas and has moderate dementia and very limited mobility. No family members are near her, and I am her POA here in Nebraska.
She was diagnosed at around 67 and has been in the ALF since she was 70. (She had a stroke at 68 and multiple TIFs. When she entered the ALF, she still could walk with a walker but refused OT/PT, so she kept firing people. So, her mobility vanished.)
My brother (who lives in CA) and I visited her in April and set her up with a Google Nest Hub and a couple of cameras in her room so that we could communicate with her. (She had either bricked multiple smartphones or lost them, so we relied on her caretakers to help her call us. I also bought her a landline phone for seniors with dementia that only required pushing two buttons to call (call button and picture button), which did not seem to help the communication.)
She's doing better than I expected at figuring out how to use the Nest and make calls. However, I wish we'd gotten her an Amazon device because she keeps saying "Google" instead of "Hey Google."
Last night, I got a call from her, and she was panicked. One of her caretakers was in the room with her and helped her call me. She told me she was coming back from the house and was so scared and leaking water. She also berated the caregiver and said they didn't know what they were doing. I talked with her for at least 30 minutes, calmed her down, and had the caretaker get her some graham crackers and peanut butter because the best I could figure out was that she was having a low blood sugar attack. The caretaker was surprised by her behavior, and I was too. When she first started living at the ALF, she was unhappy and was pretty awful to the staff. I got earfuls multiple times a week about how unhappy she was. But over the last year or so, she seemed to be okay.
We had discussed bringing her to Nebraska once her house sold (lots of legal stuff related to her late husband, but it finally sold in December.) However, her mobility issues and being in hospice (since September) make me think it would be a logistical nightmare. She has a few friends in her current area who still visit her, so if I brought her here, it would just be me visiting her.
I wish there were more resources for people in my situation. And don't even get me started on the horrors of life estates and dealing with lawyers and executors who drag everything out interminably.
