Personal Care Dilema

The last several days my cousins and I have been looking for a personal care home for our aunt to live in. She is 82 years old. She never married or had children, so we are her "kids". Aunt Jennie has lived on her own for many, many years and had been doing fine. Two of my cousins live very close to her so they would always check on her. Make sure she took her medications, etc. She recently had major surgery to fix a problem caused by diverticulitis. She's had that condition for a long time. She does have some dimentia and we think that her condition worsened because she didn't remember that she coudln't eat certain things. Well, during her illness and surgery, she was in and out of the hospital and the nursing home that she is in now. We had a meeting at the home today and they tell us that she is improving greatly, which we are very grateful for. The problem is that she no longer "qualifies" for nursing home care. We now have to find her a personal care home as she is no longer able to stay at home without supervision. That has been an eye opening experience to say the least! We have been to several places some really good, some good, some not so good, and some that we wouldn't take a dead dog to! :-{ It's really a shame how the system treats our elderly. If you don't qualify for skilled nursing (which I don't understand the qualifications) they have to tell you to leave. You then have to start the process of finding suitable places to go. We have looked at several over the last couple of days that are just beautiful. Well kept, clean, frequent activities and friendly helpful staff. The problem is that they are very pricey. These places don't accept insurances or SSI or anything of that sort. It's private pay only. So, you have to look at how much it costs and divide it by your loved ones assets and figure out how long they can stay before they basically tell you........"sorry gotta go". The pricey ones would be wonderful but how can people afford them? So you have to start looking at the more middle of the road homes and even those are a steep. And the "cheaper" ones (if you want to call them that) are just plain horrible. They are the places that people that don't want bothered with the elderly send them to basically die. The poor things just sit in chairs in front of a tv all day. I know I'm generalizing them, and I'm sure there are more affordable places out there that are much better than I'm describing here, but we can't seem to find any. I guess I'm just frustrated by the whole thing. I feel so bad for some of the people that you see. Some seem forgotten and it's so sad. Sandi and I were talking about how in other countries they revere their elderly. Not here. It seems that we sweep them under the rug. Outta sight, outta mind. How sad!!! I've not only noticed this the last few days, I have another aunt in a nursing home, and that seems to be where I've noticed that most of the residents never get visitors.

Sorry to be rambling on about this. It's just that it's important to find her a nice place to live, where she'll be happy. One bright light in all of this is that one of my cousins and I did visit a place today that we did like and it seems that it just might be affordable. Two of my other cousins and I are going back tomorrow to talk with the administrator/owner. Hopefully we've found the right place. Keep your fingers crossed!