Have you seen our plea for help on http://www.gofundme.com/? Type in “Providing Care to Seniors in Need”. If Medicaid would reimburse us immediately for the care we have provided for two Medicaid eligible individuals for the past several months, we would have enough to pay our bills. However, there is no way to know how long it will take to be reimbursed. The bills we owe do have deadlines, of course. Please help us during this critical time!! And if you are in a position to influence our policy makers, please ask them to streamline the process for families who want to care for family members in their home. We are saving the government (taxpayers) a lot of money by taking care of people here—people who would otherwise be in a nursing home and paying $5000 plus to share a room with another person. We are $1300 a month for full time attendance, plus $8 a day for food costs. Transportation, medication, and housing are extra, but even then we are cheaper than a nursing home.

What do you want for yourself when you need a little help to have the best quality of life? Do you want to live in a nursing home, where you rarely go outside the doors of the nursing home? Where you see the same sick and old people day in and day out? The same housekeepers, the same people in the dining room, the same maintenance crew, the same doctors—but the people who do the most intimate things for you, the people who dress you, bath you, administer medications and treatments, vary day to day and during the course of a day?

When my husband complains about our current financial situation, I ask him what nursing home he wants me to take him to when he needs some help when he is older (his mother and father needed care for over two years) because I am not big and strong enough to do all of it by myself. Statistics show that caregivers often die before the ones they are caring for. I do not want to hire someone to come into our home to care for him, either. I tried that when I was caring for my mother in law, and it turned my home into a workplace. I was not comfortable with in-home care. And it was terribly expensive when we used an agency. A combination might be okay. But not full time. And I will never hire a person as an independent contractor again. Unless I can afford to install a surveillance system in every room. With sound.

People typically don’t think of adult day centers licensed by the state for caring for themselves or their elderly loved ones because they don’t do a lot of advertising and have historically been utilized and designed mainly for the mentally and physically challenged younger folks. We are licensed by the state as an adult day center but we are different. We are a health club for seniors! Please come visit us and see for yourself!

May you and yours have a blessed week ahead.