Mobility – what some of us take for granted is slowly taken away

Mobility – what some of us take for granted is slowly taken away – very scary!

In the space of couple of years – which I am sure for sum people can be days, weeks or months my mums mobility has pretty much gone from being able to walk and drive to the shops and friends a normal kind of lifestyle, to now not being able to to walk barely at all…

Nothing happened all of a sudden it has just been a gradual changing but as time goes so fast – she has now been in the annex for nealy 10 years – you can now see her as a real little old lady who now needs help with most things

One of the first issues was as the mobility went she needed a stick for quite some time and we told her [particularly my wife] to use her frame more but as her experience has shown elderly people do not want to do this and the result is they often fall over,,,,

This is what happened to mum about 6 months ago, a call on the alarm buzzer which she had on her and she was on the floor..I asked her how she did it and she bent down to get dog food and took her hand of the stick – result falling over on the kitchen floor

Now have you ever tried to pick up or help up anybody who has fallen my guess is no and with no training on how to do this – virtually impossible

As I had had no training first I tried to lift her no all that did was hurt my back so I asked her to crawl very slowly into the lounge, she was very lucky to have fallen and not broken anything, once near her sofa she sat back to it and with pulling and more cushions I managed to get her into a seat – with my back hurting as the only injury

this was the first of a number of falls all without too much damage although a couple of times I had to call for an ambulance as it was impossible to lift her from lieing down – one night she fell around 20.30 in the evening and had to wait until 430 in the morning for the ambulance to arrive…once they got to her they said it could be dangerous to move someone if they have been lieing that long as chemicals build up in them so they took her to hospital to check her over..

The other time she fell over she really hurt herself – both physically and mentally although she did not break anything but this was the last time she was in hospital and I think the most changed when she came out as she stayed in for about about 6 weeks!!

The reason for this was she needed time to rest and with cover and all the shortages of staff etc she had hardly any phsio which she was meant to have, there were so few staff that she stayed in bed a lot, I think she was also frightened to go to the toilet on her own which added to delays

they were also orgasinisg personnel care which took 2 options either am or pm or both and we wanted both, I didn’t want mum who could hardly walk, go to the toilet nor get into bed without help, so wanted what care we could get!

They came to us a few times and said they could do one visit but no we stuck it out which made mum stay in for nearly six weeks and to be honest was quite happy with her there it gave us a break from the monotony of looking after her and I think she liked being looked after and she had people around her in the ward to talk to

Once they had found a care provider which was to last up to 6 weeks they came out and assessed her home and any adaptations it needed which as we had built an annex was pretty good in that respect = level access in not out, level access shower, raised toilet, large door openings for getting around in the chair and with her frame so it was ok, they did add a few grab rails but that was it

Once she was home it started of a whole new chapter and one that had its biggest challenges since we had built the annex and all moved in but this I will cover in the next instalment….

thanks for reading

David