Caring For Elderly Parents

What will happen if Mom or Dad can't reach the phone after falling or having some other medical emergency? Accidents do happen. In the Fall of 2000, my parents Imogene and Joe moved from their home in Spokane, Washington to live with my family outside of Fort Worth, Texas. My father had a stroke about a year prior, but otherwise both parents were in relatively good health. My father could no longer drive though and wanted a long term living arrangement in place for him and Mom. So we decided that they could live with our family.

Within 6 weeks of moving in though, Dad unexpectedly passed away, leaving behind his wife of 56 years. How grateful we were that long term living arrangements had been made and that Mom was with us.

While Mom had a comfortable home to live in, she still found herself home alone during the days. My wife and I both worked and our children were grown and had moved away. While Mom had friends who would periodically stop by to visit her, and while my wife would often come home from work at lunchtime to check up on her, I was still concerned that if she had an accident of some sort or other emergency that she would be unable to get to a phone to call for help.

I had seen the television commercials for the emergency pendants-you know, the one with the elderly lady on the floor pushing the button on her pendant and saying she had fallen and couldn't get up-and decided that an emergency pendant was the way to go. After doing some research on the internet, I discovered that there are two basic types of emergency pendants-ones that are available through a monitoring service and ones that are standalone emergency dialers that deliver a recorded message to programmed phone numbers of friends or family members.

We opted for a standalone emergency dialer. Mom began wearing a pendant that, when triggered, would repeatedly call up to 9 designated phone numbers until someone answered. The person answering would be instructed to press a key to distinguish that it was a live person answering the call and not an answering machine. A recorded message would then play stating that Mom needed help.

Mom's emergency dialer was only for 1-way communication, but there are emergency dialers on the market today that offer 2-way communication allowing the person in need of help to be connected via a speaker phone with the family member, friend, or emergency personnel answering the call.

I wish I could say that Mom never needed the pendant, but it proved to be useful on several occasions-such as the time she fell out of her chair and on another occasion when she had uncontrollable nosebleeds. In both of these cases, my wife received a phone call letting her know that Mom needed help, after which she rushed home to offer assistance.