How to Help the Elderly?

Image via WikipediaOne battle that has raged throughout my mother's (now, 10-day long) hospitalization has to do with nasal spray, or what my mother calls "nose drops" (long ago, they actually came in the form of a liquid that you dropped into your nose). Some people use them for years, decades, at a time. On a daily basis, several times an hour, even. This backfires, makes them dependent, or "addicted." The doctors want people to get off the nose spray and use something else, I think it's called flonase, that works if you use it twice a day. But when you do that, your nose will be clogged up for a week (until the nasal tissue gets re-adjusted).

So, while I was making decisions for my mother (at the worst of her confusional state), I went along with the doctor who said she should get off the Afrin and just use the flonase. This has not worked well, to say the least. And, now that the psychiatrist (bless her little heart) has opined (based on a 5-minute exam, and on my mother's expressed willingness to "talk to" the social worker) that my mother is competent to make her own health care decisions, the Afrin will undoubtedly come back into action.

And, I say, that's fine. No point fighting over the (relatively) little stuff (although this nose spray problem, they tell me, can exacerbate her overall breathing and swallowing problems). But big decisions are coming up, like where mother will go when she leaves the hospital. Let's say she agrees to the skilled nursing facility, short term, for some rehab to get her up and walking again. That would be great, but it will then be quickly followed by her gigantic lack of cooperation, unreasonable demands, and general trouble-making, when she gets to this facility. Already, yesterday, she refused to do physical therapy or occupational therapy, and once again told the therapists to "get the f*ck out of" her room.

And this is what I worry so much about... what happens, when they call me and tell me that they cannot help her any more? It takes, I hear, 3 months to get guardianship accomplished...

And let's say they actually do diagnose dementia, while she is at the nursing home (and I believe she has had a slowly progressing dementia, on top of her personality problems, for years... just now it is becoming disabling)? Then there is the problem, again, of how medication is used/abused in nursing homes to subdue difficult patients; click here for a recent NYT article about that... I'll just have to take it on a day-by-day, moment-by-moment basis, noticing all the while that these anticipated future disasters keep intruding into my mind.