Preparing for Transitions Part 4: Shifting Responsibilities, with Daphne Davis
Daphne Davis at Pinnacle Senior Placements talks about helping families every day to go through the transitions process. How do you prepare yourself as children and as the person moving during the actual physical changes? There are emotional changes, physical responsibilities that are no longer yours. She talks about how to shift your perspective to having a caretaker be your eyes and ears for your loved ones, how to build that trust, and how to help your loved ones build trust with their caregivers.
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*The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
The following podcast is provided by pinnacles senior placements LLC and answers for elders radio. And Welcome back everyone to answers for elders radio. And we have been talking this last hours blown by, about how do you begin to make the change? We’re thinking about downsizing, maybe thinking about you know what happens in the future. Maybe I just don’t. You’re just in a big house. I know one of our advertisements running on the station right now. It’s a lady says it’s too much to deal with the stay and too much to deal with to move. That is a real statement. It’s something that can be overwhelming and we’re talking about the process of how does that happen? And doubt me, I’m so glad you’re here because you help families every single day go through this process. It is probably a huge issue. It is a huge issue and so far this hour we’ve been talking about people who are fairly healthy, people who can make their own decisions cognitively. Are In fact people that are moving from their home and there’s a whole entity of people that, like I said at the very beginning, it would do my heart well if I talk to people at this stage of life more than the crisis stage of life, and most people that I help are in crisis or on the brink of crisis. And so a couple of things that I want to talk about is how do you prepare yourself as children and as the person moving during the actual physical changes, because there’s a lot of emotional changes that change in your hearts. There’s a lot of physical responsibilities that are no longer more are no longer yours to have to worry about. And how do I shift from having somebody else be a part of my mom and dad’s life to be, you know, to be my eyes and ears now, and how do I build that trust and how do I have my mom and dad build the trust with their caregivers? Whether they’re they’re totally healthier or or need a lot of help, it doesn’t matter. There’s still a trust piece that happens, you, as a family member, have been their go to more than likely. You are there rock, you are their security blanket, you are the people that they can turn to. Sometimes there’s exceptions to that and parents are still fiercely independent and they don’t let you in on things, and that’s where their change is going to be to include you. So as you’re making that transition, when we’re working with our families, we help identify things, you Meique to their story that may come up so there’s not surprises. The first thirty days of someone moving are the hardest. For a third days are the ones that say, wait a minute, what did I what did I decide to do? This isn’t what I expected, this isn’t what I said. They don’t make a decision. And then is it common that they’ve been once they make a decision, they’re going to make a move, and then they chicken out or they pull back? Is Very so. Yes, very much so. I’m working a lot, and I think this is just the times with relationship to Covid I’m working a lot with couples right now in their own home and this is a very real phenomena. Everything makes sense when I’m talking with them in their home or on the phone or on Zoom, because we meet any anyway. And then, Oh, we’ve made a decision to actually you know, let me do some research, let me find what meets your highest values in our conversation that we discovered and let’s go and look at some places together, and usually about three or four days before our appointment, I regularly get a call of cancelation and and that is very, very, very normal. We expected, we know that this is likely to happen, because this is a big move. Even when I meet with all the children and the elders themselves and we’ve had a wonderful, you know, hour and a half conversation in the home, it will change. You know me expect this because there’s more unknown and and so what I do is gracefully saying you know what I understand. So then that’s just fine. We will get connected later when it feels a little better. And I do ask permission. Can I call you in thirty or sixty days? Can I give you a call just to check in and see how things are going? And almost always I get a yes, almost always. And so then I follow up with them and they’ve had time to think of more questions. And so part of this is for me to be answering questions and I would I would imagine that a lot of that fear is fear of the unknown and it’s that fear of I haven’t asked enough questions, I don’t know enough information. I feel like, and you know all of these things are being thrust at me and it may be I know for the adult child you’re going like well, well, that we’ve had all the questions answered, but we have to understand, especially with the senior that may feel like they you know, they may have a little bit of dementia, they may not be a hundred percent. Like you said, it’s towards a crisis. They’re going to hang on to whatever they feel like is most familiar and that is their surroundings. Right. It’s even though it’s not safe, it’s still what they know. Is that absolutely I just met with a family that’s out on Concett planting and it was, you know, of the phone call was triggered by a daughter. Mom had been to the hospital twice in one week thinking that she was having a stroke or a Tia or something. It turned out to be a panic attack. Husband is in the most difficult part of a journey through dementia where he recognizes that he’s not quite on part and so he’s angry and he doesn’t understand why things are so upside down or people are losing patients or reiterating information to him that he’s going to save faith and his particular style is to push back with defensive costume. So we have a nice conversation. Everybody’s on the zoom call. Wife is going to take these three steps, with three steps to do. She says yes, I can do that. Kids are going to support her and we follow up with her and she changed her mind and she says no, I’m not going to do any of that. And the children are really, really frustrated because they they can see from the outside how hard this is on their mom tells him their Dad’s health. I mean both are struggling, but at the same time they don’t have an understanding of mom and dad are living together, mom and dad are making each day work and sometimes, when there’s those good days, mom can get to the point of saying, you know, this week wasn’t so bad, I can go another week, rather than seeing making a change is such a simple change of getting medication, making a change of any kind is overwhelming. It doesn’t save faith for my husband, but there’s so many emotions that go into this. Have someone like US help you through that. I mean we say in our in our training all the time at Pinnacle that you know, we do have a social worker hand on sometimes and sometimes we’re just a good friend. Our role is to build trust. That’s why when someone called me and says, you know what, I’m not ready to go look at anything, I know that I’ve done my best and building trust and relationship and a rapport so that they can call me when they are ready. This is about building a relationship. It’s a big move for you to go as a children and say, you know what, and this happened just a couple weeks ago to a woman says to me, I live in touch in such neighborhood and just down the street is a community. Maybe that would be good for my mom. The location is great. Well, it might be. I met the mom and the community would not be appropriate for her mother at all, but she didn’t have enough information to know. What do we even look for a community? How? How do I know the personality of because mean, how do I know what the values are of a community? And so the whole point that I’m wanting to get to is we take you through this journey on your timeline, with your value system. Nothing is imposed on you. We’re here to help. Yeah, we’re here to help. If there was ever a time of it being really important for families to make good buying decisions. Are Buying services, you’re buying care, you’re buying housing, you’re buying food, you’re buying a quality of life, you’re buying activities, and it’s the different. It’s really important now to have your Eyes Wide Open. You get to make whatever decision you want. I am never a decisionmaker, only an information post. If there is, and I hope that will makes sense to everyone, but if there is health issues, we also will help you in the logistics of having doctors information shared, having prescriptions moved to a new pharmacy that does what we call a MAR medication assistance record. We help you figure out how do we maximize the buying power of our mail order that we do now? Can I still get the same pricing from the pharmacy that the community uses? We talk about what activities of daily living needs support in your mom and dad’s life. We talk about the cost of that the benefits of it. Do we want to start with more care or less care at the beginning? What are the pros and cons of doing that? My particular position is start with more care and back up. It’s better to set someone up for success. them the gift of being able to relax into their next chapter of life, give them the the the opportunity to use the energy that they’re given every day on the things that matter to them rather than survival things. But I think a key role of what you do is you help to give the families an understanding of what they’re what the needs are of their loved one, as well as how they can best support that. I think one of the things that I lacked when I was caring for my mom is how do you best support your mom in her care plans, because I had an idea of what I thought based on my own realization’s right, but I didn’t know anything about things like cowages care or, you know, what is it care plan, or what do I ask in a care conference or things like that, and you can help guide families in that direction as well. Is that my absolutely again, and we are not the decision makers, but I do ask permission all the time. You know, I’d say, since then, can I just fill in the blanks a little bit? Initially, what I get as weird open book. Help us, we don’t know what we’re doing. Yeah, and and I love that. You know, sometimes I’ll get a center daughter that you know it’s like no, I’ve got this handled, and so we back up and let them figure things out. Usually it’s a few more books. So I was saying. But we really want to make this for elders and smoother transition as possible and for you, the people who are supporting your seniors, for you to have a sense of peace. Sometimes, when you’ve been the person that goes and gives mom the bath every Saturday afternoon and you set her hair after that bath and now someone else is going to be doing it, that may cause you anxiety like you didn’t expect. Well, it’s this has been so valuable and definitely I I’m so glad that we’ve talked about this because I think a lot of us just starting to have these conversations. And so how do we reach you? You reach me at my phone number, which is eight hundred and fifty five, seven, thirty four, one five hundred. Again, eight hundred and fifty five, seven, three four, one fifteen hundred, and then also at Pinnacle Senior Placementscom, which is our website, and that’s Pinnacle Senior Placementscom. And guess what, everyone’s Daphne is also on the answer for Elvis podcast. Network and we are everywhere now online, and so you can call your out of state relatives, you can call people you know all across the country and even into the world and learn what we have. We have a library of hundreds and hundreds of podcasts on senior care and Daphne’s a big part of that. So go to you, I mean we we’re on apple, we’re on Google, we’re on spotify, we’re on you name it. So just if you go to answers for elders, you can. All you have to do is type and Japanese Davis and you will find her there, along with our amazing experts that we have on our show. And so wishing all of you is things are opening up in the month of May. Yay, a wonderful, wonderful rest of your week and until then, everyone be good to each other. The preceding podcast was provided by pinnacles senior placements LLC and answers for elders radio. To contact pinnacles senior placements, go to pinnacles senior PLACEMENTSCOM.
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Originally published May 23, 2021