We are really pleased to announce the first post from our new guest blogger, Peregrine Pickles, who writes about his experience of realising his father needed a care home....
When people hear that I recently moved my Dad into a care home, I am often asked, ‘how do you know when it’s the right time?’
The answer of course depends upon individual circumstances, but my experience is that you know very quickly when the time has come. The question suddenly becomes not whether or when, but where.
My Dad lived on his own, in the house where I grew up, for a decade after my mother died. It took me three years to move him to a sheltered flat near me, where I could ‘keep an eye on him’. At first Dad resisted the move. Then we couldn’t sell his house. Then he didn’t feel up to the move, saying he thought it would ‘finish him off’. Yet every time I spoke to his neighbours, whom I relied upon as his life support system, I knew that time was running out.
When we finally moved Dad to sheltered accommodation near my family home, it felt like a great achievement. People told me he would discover a ‘new lease of life’ when he made friends in his new home. But this never happened. Instead he was bullied and later shunned by the more active residents who clearly thought that Dad was not fit to join their community.
During the course of that year, Dad gradually gave up his independence and allowed my wife and I to take over. We hired a cleaner and we did his shopping and laundry. I sorted out his admin and finances, organised his medical appointments, took him out to a country pub every week. We got him meals on wheels and eventually booked a care agency to visit him daily to help with his morning routine.
In the last two weeks of Dad’s supported independent living, these were the signs that told me the time had come to place Dad in a care home:
- visiting him in the evening to find his meals on wheels untouched on his dinner table
- a note from the carer saying she had found Dad ‘already up and dressed’ when in fact he had never made it to bed from the night before
- having to leave work early because I was so worried that Dad wasn’t answering the phone
- finding Dad shivering and exhausted in a bath of cold water that he had been stuck in all day without pressing the panic alarm because ‘he didn’t want to be a nuisance’
- finding that I was too embarrassed to tell anyone what I was going through because I knew what they would say
- realising that the cost of a care home was nothing compared to how I would feel if Dad died of hypothermia as a result of my neglect
- realising that Dad’s welfare was now absolutely my responsibility and that the ‘buck stopped with me’
Six months later, Dad is well looked after in a good care home with some exceptional staff. While the cost of the home is eye-watering by any standards, I now consider it pretty good value when you realise what’s involved in 24 hour care. As an only child, Dad is completely dependent upon me to make all his decisions for him. He has become my ‘fourth child’ and now I write about my reverse parenting challenge in a regular blog at www.declineandfalls.com
Recent Comments