Don't Get Old!

Can't believe how long it's been since I've posted to my blog. This has been a difficult year with a lot of strain on my time, nerves and energy. Around September my sister and I made the hard but necessary decision to place our mother in a nursing home – she simply couldn't live on her own anymore. I contacted a place called “A Place for Mom” which listed nursing homes, and they were eager to help. The only problem with them is that they only list nursing homes that pay a fee to be listed on their web site. This means that they don't provide information about other, possibly better nursing homes that don't pay – or need to pay – to be on their site. What good is that? We quickly forgot about aplaceformom.com and decided to investigate different homes on our own.

We considered ourselves lucky to ultimately place our mother in what was considered one of the best nursing homes in New York City, the Jewish Home and Hospital on Kingsbridge Road in the Bronx [which takes people of any faith, although our mother was Jewish]. Mom seemed to be slowly adjusting to the place when my sister got a call in the middle of the night that our mother had had to be rushed to the emergency room after an “accident.” When we got to the hospital we were shocked to see that Mom looked as if she'd been in a head-on collision. I won't go into the details, but it was horrendous. She required surgery, which she survived, but died a few days later. I can't go into specifics as there is still an ongoing investigation into what actually happened to our mother that night.

And this is one of the better nursing homes!

More on this later.