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Author: Jane Gross ISBN : Product Detai New from Format: PDF
Download PRETITLE A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves POSTTITLE from mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link Just a few of the vitally important lessons in caring for your aging parent—and yourself—from Jane Gross in A Bittersweet Season Author: Jane Gross ISBN : Product Detai New from Format: PDFAs painful as the role reversal between parent and child may be for you, assume it is worse for your mother or father, so take care not to demean or humiliate them.
Avoid hospitals and emergency rooms, as well as multiple relocations from home to assisted living facility to nursing home, since all can cause dramatic declines in physical and cognitive well-being among the aged.
Do not accept the canard that no decent child sends a parent to a nursing home. Good nursing home care, which supports the entire family, can be vastly superior to the pretty trappings but thin staffing of assisted living or the solitude of being at home, even with round-the-clock help.
Important Facts
Every state has its own laws, eligibility standards, and licensing requirements for financial, legal, residential, and other matters that affect the elderly, including qualification for Medicare. Assume anything you understand in the state where your parents once lived no longer applies if they move.
Many doctors will not accept new Medicare patients, nor are they legally required to do so, especially significant if a parent is moving a long distance to be near family in old age.
An adult child with power of attorney can use a parent’s money for legitimate expenses and thus hasten the spend-down to Medicaid eligibility. In other words, you are doing your parent no favor—assuming he or she is likely to exhaust personal financial resources—by paying rent, stocking the refrigerator, buying clothes, or taking him or her to the hairdresser or barber.
From the Hardcover edition.Direct download links available for PRETITLE A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves POSTTITLE
- File Size: 2002 KB
- Print Length: 450 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 030747240X
- Publisher: Knopf; Reprint edition (April 26, 2011)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B004DEPII8
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #84,924 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #7 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Medical eBooks > Physician & Patient > Caregiving
- #10 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Parenting & Relationships > Aging Parents > Eldercare
- #24 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Parenting & Relationships > Aging Parents > Aging
- #7 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Medical eBooks > Physician & Patient > Caregiving
- #10 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Parenting & Relationships > Aging Parents > Eldercare
- #24 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Parenting & Relationships > Aging Parents > Aging
A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves PDF
This is a memoir about the final years in the life of the author's mother - AND a guide to the Rube-Goldberg-like complexities of Medicare, Medicaid, assisted living facilities (great for those who need no assistance), and nursing homes. It's about how the system is broken - a ridiculous maze of conflicting and unrealistic rules that (unsuccessfully) try to make a for-profit health care system humane. It's also about how, as Phillip Roth put it, "Old age isn't a battle - it's a massacre."
The number one killer in the US is heart disease - number two is cancer. After a motley assortment of other diseases causing "early" death, we are left with that large group where everything is wearing out but the body refuses to die. This group is subjected to endless serial humiliations - physical and financial. Even if older couples enter their golden years with a million dollars they can die bankrupt and on Medicaid. Enlightened ones might even plan for it and give their assets away early. The wealthy and the destitute have less to worry about.
Gross definitely gets it right. My wife and I (mainly my wife - as Gross succinctly points out, the primary family rep is female at least 80% of the time), are going through this for the third and fourth times now. We have faced or are facing most of the issues she covers. Her chapter about Thanksgiving dinner in the nursing home (touching on a pecking order resembling a high school cafeteria) was perfect. She could have been describing our exact facility - with one dining room for those who could use a fork and another for those who required "feeders." In her words, "The elderly hate that you have to visit them in these surroundings on a holiday, so act like you're having a decent time even if you're not.
The worst nightmare of most adult children is that their parents will die a lingering death, suffering a drawn-out and humiliating series of losses and depleting all financial reserves. Yet somehow, we think, "It won't happen to OUR family."
Wrong! In Jane Gross's important new book, she reveals that approximately 40 percent of Americans, generally past the age of 85 will follow this course - and that number will only grow with improvements and prevention and treatment of cancer, heart disease, and pulmonary disease.
Those of us who are baby boomers - used to being in control - must stand by and (as one of Jane's bloggers stated), "watch our mothers un-live." Yet we are stuck in a medical world where old age is considered a disease with a cure...when in reality, precisely the opposite is true. There ARE no heroics and there IS no cure for aging. Jane quotes Dr. Sherwin Nuland in saying, "The very old do not succumb to disease, they implode their way into eternity."
This one is PERSONAL for me. Like the author, I was thrust into an unanticipated role of moving my vibrant mother halfway across the country to a senior facility nearby. It upended my life, causing never-ending cycles of guilt, resentment, frustration, overriding terror and exhaustion - along with the days of feeling unaccountably blessed to have the chance to be a part of my mother's world again. I trusted my intelligence and management skills and believed I was making all the right choices. I wish I had read this book two years ago! Among the insights that Jane Gross reveals:
*The Medicare fee-for-service system is broken. To get paid, doctors must recommend a billable procedure; recommendations on lifestyle changes, for example, translate to no payment.
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