I did not believe I could manage this entire journey at home. I thought in the last year Mom would go to a home and my staff would go with her during the day leaving the nursing home to take care of the night shift.  It would all work out…somehow.

As each stage came along I would learn something new.  Sometimes the lessons came easily and sometimes the lessons were hard.  I did learn that change would be a constant while caring for Mom.  After dancing her way through year nine, ten and eleven Mom quit walking in her final year.

Mom still slept in her bedroom and we had a variety of methods that were all bad for getting her out of bed and into her chair.  I felt using a lift would terrify her when in fact it was me that was terrified of using a lift and of seeing our family home changed into a palliative care home.

On my suggestion, my team tried to slide a board under her and then slide the board onto the flat chair and then remove the board and voila!  So easy.  Before this would be completed Mom would be crying and the team would be crying and they would call me five hours away and I would be crying.  After several weeks I finally experienced it for myself and again we were all crying.  The next time I tripled Mom’s drugs and she was laughing but that was not a good solution.  She seemed fine with it! I need to also have the same dose of drugs for this to work!

I did the research and figured out a feasible plan, rented the lift and purchased the hospital bed.  On the day the lift was due to arrive we moved furniture around in the house so Mom’s bed was now in the living room, the living room tucked into a cozy space beside the fireplace in what was the dining room and Mom’s bedroom became the storage room for all the furniture that did not fit.  So easy.

My brain froze in the middle of this process.  If it had not been for a team member that just started pushing furniture around to make it happen I do not know what would have been.  When we were done, Mom’s bed looked out over the garden and was a room that was full of light and easy for the team to move around in.  I hung extra curtains to give her a sense of a bedroom at night.  The cozy furniture nock by the fireplace was an intimate spot.

It was still home despite my fears and Mom loved the lift!  She would swing like a queen as we gently lifted her into the air and over to her chair.  One team member stuck flower stickers on the ceiling so her eyes had something to focus on when in bed and at Christmas we wrapped the lift in mini lights.  We colored on the living room windows in winter to break up the gray of winter.  The Christmas tree fit in the mini living room and we had a lovely Christmas party.

I could have got a hospital bed for free but I did not discover that until after I had bought one. Palliative care eventually covered the cost of the lift.  The lift company trained us on using the lift.  It was all doable once I wrapped my stubborn brain around this next change.