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Susan Fusco-Fazio's avatar

as always, your writing is important work important message last week I spent in Connecticut trying to talk my mother into going to the hospital. She’s 91 very stubborn and wants to live life by her own accord however, she seriously needed to go to the hospital. I’m very adapted, sensing medical problems, especially cardiac due to my history with my congenital heart disease, daughter I knew she had plural fusion behind her lungs, and she had been complaining of back pain and I assumed it was back fractures, she couldn’t stand up to force it and call an ambulance even though some on the phone encouraging me to just call. It took me four days to get her to agree to go, but then she felt empowered that it was her decision as a very tough position to be put in very different from when I was caregiving my daughter, who was more compliant though she was too she knew and she trusted my intuition and decisions. People don’t expect to 91. My mom is sound of mind and she wants to direct her own destiny which I applaud. However, I kept saying to her you have to be realistic, you have to be realistic you need to go to the hospital anyway all I can tell you is it took almost as many days to heal since I’ve been home in Massachusetts as she has been treated in the hospital, she is now in rehab and I will be going back there when she goes home to make sure she has good support in the home once again and I will be creasing my visits out of state to see her it’s not easy to be a and caregiver keep your own calm and sense of self. There’s a lot of limbo and waiting and weighing out how to support the person, how to nudge them , and how to say you have to go to the hospital when you area caregiver.

Its enough to care for oneself and to get oneself out of denial when we need to be out of denial, but it’s even harder sometimes to get someone else out of denial.

It was very hard to be in that position, but somehow we got through it and my mom is much better now and she’s doing well and rehab and will hopefully make it back home, thanksfor all your writing and research. unfortunately her care in the hospital was a lot worse than it was three years ago she said- nurses are still nice but rather shortstaffed and abrupt sometimes and pain meds were hard to come by. Everyone’s afraid that you’ll become addicted. My mom is 91. It’s ridiculous to think she’ll become addicted to oxy if she’s on it for a few days, so they abruptly took her off. I’m just put her on Tylenol and she was in terrible pain.

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DocTalk, Allan N Schwartz PhD's avatar

Wonderful work

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