Agree with
@bgmathteach this is not healthy for anyone involved. I agree with others who say she might improve a lot - health-wise and behaviorally - in a nursing home. I doubt that she will never speak to you again. If it is close enough by, you can visit often enough to keep tabs on her care and supplement her care if you're worried about that. You can bring meals. But I have never heard of a month's visit as a "try out". Better would be to look into a daycare situation first. That may be one of the respite options available to you that
@RoyalChick refers to.
Once they get their hands on a resident, nursing homes are loathe to let them go, they count on the dollars filling that bed brings, and I'm guessing it's a big administrative cost to get a residence started. Our experience was they'll find any number of reasons to keep someone there. You have to be fit as a fiddle to get out.
In my family, once my sisters and I were faced with a medical "rock and a hard place" with Mom and we saw she hated it there and wasn't thriving, we felt if she was going to just keep declining and die, it would be better for her in her own home. Maybe she would stabilize, probably not. We had arranged for caregivers to watch her and keep her company 24/7 and we arranged for all the equipment too - hospital bed, etc., plus we could arrange hospice medical care as soon as she was home.
Still, we still had a heck of a time getting her out. We wound up having to do it "against doctor's orders." I think it's because the home can't risk any adverse event after discharge, or they get badly dinged by Medicare. That meant we broke her outta there - er, transported her -from start to finish- ourselves, no hospital-provided transport, and no private one was available. My BIL and his two good friends provided lifting power up her stairs. I swear it takes a village!
I should say "against
their doctor's orders." That's another thing: at least in New York State, once you go into a nursing home you become completely their responsibility. This means you lose all your regular doctors, all the PA's and all the nurses who knew you. We live in a rural area and it's not like she suddenly was on another planet. Her familiar medical team was in the same town about three blocks away! We could not ask for any of them to see her. You come under the care of one doctor whom you do not choose, one or two nurses and a bunch of CNA's, all of whom are overworked and none of whom have ever seen you before. All you bring with you is what can be input into pre-defined categories on a medical record.
No doubt I have ranted on this topic before? We need chicks!
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I love my job!
