Blessings, Darlings! Here's part 2 of "What has Fern & Family been up to, since she clearly wasn't HERE".
THE LEGAL STUFF
Here, we have the POA/medical that was missing, but no medical folks really cared. It was enough that my husband was closest kin, and that she was clearly suffering from advanced Alzheimer's. The guardianship was .... well, we'd given the lawyer cash but not signed the agreement yet.
But what about paying her bills, medical and otherwise, if the medigap insurance wasn't reinstated? Would the house have to be sold to get down to medicare asset levels? The bank wouldn't give us info on her account balances and CDs until we had guardianship.
And .... a few years back, well into her dementia, she had changed her will, so that her boyfriend gets to stay in the house until his death. Which we're not sure he'll be able to afford to keep up. Did the lawyer know she had dementia? Who knows?
Did she change who gets her life insurance? Dunno that, either.
THE GOOD STUFF
During all of this, there was one immensely bright spot. Bob and I got in contact with our niece, Chelsea (Bob's sister's daughter). She lives about 100 miles from my MIL (unlike our east-coast to mid-west distance) and is smart and knowledgeable and had experience in guardianship issues, and has friends who are lawyers and know lawyers in the state my MIL was in. AND she's a foodie. She and her boyfriend and the CH got together in my MIL's city to work together on all the issues and go thru' my MIL's papers.
Getting back in touch with her again was a wonderful thing. We should have done it years ago.
Also, H managed to get the medigap insurance thru' her pension reinstated, after the boyfriend and we paid the back-do amount. Not only that, but it was reinstated back to the time it was cancelled, so all broken hip related costs would be covered. But this was cleared up after she'd been moved to the other nursing home.
Stay tuned for the next urgent but anything but exciting episode!
Frondly, Fern
Showing posts with label Alzheimer's. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alzheimer's. Show all posts
Monday, February 4, 2013
Friday, February 1, 2013
Remember Me? Summary, Part 1
Blessings, Darlings! Remember Me?
It's been a while, hasn't it? Let me give you a quick summary of what I've been up to since the middle of November. BTW - this 'quick summary' is going to take several blog posts.....
Around noon on Saturday, November 17, 2012, we got a call from my Mother In Law's live-in boyfriend called, saying "You better get here quick, she doesn't have long." Uh ... what? Turned out she had fallen in the kitchen and couldn't get up. He and a neighbor had moved her to her bed .... where she was agitated and fallen out of it, too. I insisted that he call an ambulance (which he was against calling, on the grounds that they couldn't afford the bill. Never mind Medicare and co-insurance ... but more on the co-insurance later). I won that battle, the ambulance was called and they took her to the hospital.
BROKEN HIP
My MIL being 92, no one should be surprised that the issue was a broken hip. So the Hubby, as next of kin to his very confused Alzheimer's-stricken mother, had to decide what treatment path to follow. Bed rest until ... healed? Surgery? Would it require a hip replacement? The surgeon didn't exactly burn up the lines getting in touch with us with details on what surgery would be required... While we waiting for more details of the surgical options, I looked up probable outcomes. None of them were good. Huge likelihood of death (from infection from bedsores or other complications) if no surgery, huge likelihood of death (from general decline and other complications) if surgery. But her level of pain would be reduced if the bone was surgically repaired. So, we chose surgery, which fortunately would NOT include hip replacement.
Very few will be surprised that by that age, she was already on an assortment of medicine ... one of which was a blood thinner. By the end of surgery (which was several days after the hip broke) she had needed several pints of blood and, due to the fall, was a bruised mess.
Worse that that, going under anesthesia had made her Alzheimer's FAR FAR worse. For a while she didn't know her name. I don't know if she ever even remembered her boyfriend's name (she certainly recognized his face) or remembered the H at all.
Now .... where to go for 'rehab' after the hospital stay would end? Only two places in her small city would take Medicare patients with Alzheimer's and dementia. We picked the one with a slightly lower death rate of patients .... but after she got there we discovered that Medicare only covers 21 days. After that she'd need to rely on medigap insurance or apply for Medicaid.
But her boyfriend had fucked up payments on the Medigap insurance. Hubby started to work on seeing if that could be fixed, we researched what was involved with getting her on Medicaid. Oh, and guess what - the rehab place didn't have any available Medicaid beds, so at day 20 she was switched to the other rehab center, anyway. Because we didn't know if the insurance thing would be resolved in her favor or not.
Oh, wait - I left another thing out. We couldn't find the POA (power of attorney) giving Bob authorization to make medical decisions for his mother. And there was no POA giving him authority over her finances. We needed that to file for medicaid for her, and should have had that to work on the medigap insurance issues. So we contacted an attorney chosen almost at random, and paid HIM almost $4K.
During all this, the H flew out there to try to go thru' all her insurance paperwork and such. During THAT her boyfriend was ... shall we say uncooperative. So much so that CH moved from staying at his Mom's house (not at ALL her in BF's name) into a hotel, and renting a car. As if just getting emergency air tickets to her small city wasn't expensive enough. With all this, our credit card was damn near maxed out. And with the CH not working .... it's not like we get paid vacations or medical leave, this being our own business and no money comes in if he doesn't work .... our finances went even more to hell.
Oh, and the BF insists that my husband left the paperwork 'a mess, and took lots of stuff'. In fact, he made copies and gave EVERYTHING back .... and is a Virgo - organization is his middle name. He HATES messes, no way he left a mess.
So, that's part 1 of what we've been up to. Stay tuned for more!
Frondly, Fern
It's been a while, hasn't it? Let me give you a quick summary of what I've been up to since the middle of November. BTW - this 'quick summary' is going to take several blog posts.....
Around noon on Saturday, November 17, 2012, we got a call from my Mother In Law's live-in boyfriend called, saying "You better get here quick, she doesn't have long." Uh ... what? Turned out she had fallen in the kitchen and couldn't get up. He and a neighbor had moved her to her bed .... where she was agitated and fallen out of it, too. I insisted that he call an ambulance (which he was against calling, on the grounds that they couldn't afford the bill. Never mind Medicare and co-insurance ... but more on the co-insurance later). I won that battle, the ambulance was called and they took her to the hospital.
BROKEN HIP
My MIL being 92, no one should be surprised that the issue was a broken hip. So the Hubby, as next of kin to his very confused Alzheimer's-stricken mother, had to decide what treatment path to follow. Bed rest until ... healed? Surgery? Would it require a hip replacement? The surgeon didn't exactly burn up the lines getting in touch with us with details on what surgery would be required... While we waiting for more details of the surgical options, I looked up probable outcomes. None of them were good. Huge likelihood of death (from infection from bedsores or other complications) if no surgery, huge likelihood of death (from general decline and other complications) if surgery. But her level of pain would be reduced if the bone was surgically repaired. So, we chose surgery, which fortunately would NOT include hip replacement.
Very few will be surprised that by that age, she was already on an assortment of medicine ... one of which was a blood thinner. By the end of surgery (which was several days after the hip broke) she had needed several pints of blood and, due to the fall, was a bruised mess.
Worse that that, going under anesthesia had made her Alzheimer's FAR FAR worse. For a while she didn't know her name. I don't know if she ever even remembered her boyfriend's name (she certainly recognized his face) or remembered the H at all.
Now .... where to go for 'rehab' after the hospital stay would end? Only two places in her small city would take Medicare patients with Alzheimer's and dementia. We picked the one with a slightly lower death rate of patients .... but after she got there we discovered that Medicare only covers 21 days. After that she'd need to rely on medigap insurance or apply for Medicaid.
But her boyfriend had fucked up payments on the Medigap insurance. Hubby started to work on seeing if that could be fixed, we researched what was involved with getting her on Medicaid. Oh, and guess what - the rehab place didn't have any available Medicaid beds, so at day 20 she was switched to the other rehab center, anyway. Because we didn't know if the insurance thing would be resolved in her favor or not.
Oh, wait - I left another thing out. We couldn't find the POA (power of attorney) giving Bob authorization to make medical decisions for his mother. And there was no POA giving him authority over her finances. We needed that to file for medicaid for her, and should have had that to work on the medigap insurance issues. So we contacted an attorney chosen almost at random, and paid HIM almost $4K.
During all this, the H flew out there to try to go thru' all her insurance paperwork and such. During THAT her boyfriend was ... shall we say uncooperative. So much so that CH moved from staying at his Mom's house (not at ALL her in BF's name) into a hotel, and renting a car. As if just getting emergency air tickets to her small city wasn't expensive enough. With all this, our credit card was damn near maxed out. And with the CH not working .... it's not like we get paid vacations or medical leave, this being our own business and no money comes in if he doesn't work .... our finances went even more to hell.
Oh, and the BF insists that my husband left the paperwork 'a mess, and took lots of stuff'. In fact, he made copies and gave EVERYTHING back .... and is a Virgo - organization is his middle name. He HATES messes, no way he left a mess.
So, that's part 1 of what we've been up to. Stay tuned for more!
Frondly, Fern
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
