When to Consider Assisted Living

You’ve been living in your own home for a long time. Now you’re wondering if it’s time to make the move to assisted living.

What are the questions you should be asking?

Frontida Senior Living Facilities, like Azalea Place in Kenosha, provide you with posts like this one to help you live your best life.

Is Your Home Hard to Maintain?

Homes take work, both inside and out. Are you able to keep up?

Cleaning

• Can you clean your kitchen? Bathroom? Bathtub?
• Do you risk falling while vacuuming the stairs?
• Do the number of rooms overwhelm you?
• Does your laundry require you to climb stairs with piles of dirty/clean clothes?
• Do multi-levels mean carrying vacuums up and down those stairs?

Upkeep of house projects

• Is there cracked linoleum that could cause you to trip?
• Are your banisters loose? Stairs uneven?
• Do you have drafty windows or inefficient heating/air conditioning that keep you chilled or sweating and often fighting illnesses? Does the house temperature make it difficult to sleep at night?
• Do you have heavy doors or difficult-to-maneuver doorknobs?

Maintaining the grounds

• Is your lawn too large for you to mow comfortably? Is the ground uneven such that you could twist, sprain, or break your ankle, knee, or hip or even fall and hit your head?
• How long is your sidewalk/driveway? Can you shovel snow? Ice? Is it gravel or does it have crumbling pavement that could trip you? A slip-and-slide mud patch? Hilly?
• Do you have a lot of trees that require raking? Do your gutters need cleaning regularly?

If these chores and job are becoming difficult, do you have someone who can help you regularly? Both inside and out?

Or could you be in danger of strangers who would “offer” to help but really want to take advantage of you?

Is It Difficult to Connect to Friends and Family

Connection is important physically, mentally, and emotionally. But we live in a transient world. Friends and family move away or even go live in assisted living themselves.

And loneliness can literally be harmful to your health.

• Do you know your neighbors? Church friends?
• Do you have people to call when needs arise?
• Is your family too far away to spend regular time with you?
• Is the tv or social media your only human interaction? Do you have someone to talk to? Share life with?
• Do you have company over to play games other than solitaire?
• Are you lonely?
• Is there someone you can talk to when you’re anxious? Fearful? Excited? Happy?

In other words, would a senior living community provide you with necessary human interaction and activities that you aren’t getting elsewhere?

How Easy Is It to Get Around?

How mobile are you?

Cooking

• Can you meal prep? Or at least get healthy meals?
• Can you serve them up for yourself or do you have someone who can prepare them for you?
• Do you tend to choke on your food while eating?

Bathing

• Are you able to get in and out of the shower safely?
• Can you bend down to care for your feet? (nails, callouses, …) Some doctors say foot health is one of the most important issues for seniors. Sores can cause swelling, swelling causes imbalances, imbalances cause falls.
• Would someone know if you fell?

Climbing Stairs

• Do you have stairs inside? Outside?
• Do you struggle with depth perception—or numb feet—such that those stairs are hard to walk?

Falling

• Have you found yourself unsteady in the past? How many too times have you fallen? How serious were the falls?

Exercise

• Keeping active keeps you active. (The old “what’s in motion stays in motion.”) Are you able to exercise?
• Do you have friends or family nearby who can spur you on to movement, even when you just want to be a couch potato?

Getting Out

• Do you have a way to get fresh air? Natural sunlight?
• Do you have a way to buy what you need at stories? Like healthy groceries?
• Do you have friends to interact with when you go out?
• Are you fearful of going out where you are?

The ultimate question: If you had an emergency—fire, flood, health issue—could you get out of the house and to help?

How Is Your Health?

Some health issues can be taken care of with a band aid. Slap it on and keep moving. But some problems make it hard to get through the day alone.

Emotionally

• Again, are you anxious? Depressed? Fearful? Lonely? Grieving?
• Would it help to live with other people your age who have similar experiences in life?

Physically

• Do you need rehab? Need encouragement to do your physically therapy exercises?
• Struggle with heart palpitations? Loss of breath? Dizziness?
• Are your symptoms of MS, Parkinson’s, arthritis making life harder to manage on your own?
• Are you stable on your feet?
• Do you take more than four different pills a day? If you do, you are more at a risk of complications. And one of those is a risk of falling.
• Would someone close by know if you were in trouble? Could they get you help in time?

Dietarily

• Do you have food limitations that make food prep difficult?
• Do you struggle to eat regularly? Tend to forget whether you’ve already eaten?
• Feel so anxious, lonely, depressed that you don’t really want to eat?
• If someone else made you delicious meals, would it take the pressure off and help you eat healthier? Do you need company while you eat?

Mentally

• Are you forgetting things? Find yourself wondering what room you’re in?
• Getting lost on walks?
• Struggling to remember friends and family?
• Scared to tell your family that you’re struggling?

Is one health issue piling on another and another till you feel like the dominos are falling?

Is Now the Time?

Struggling with one or two of these areas is not a big deal. In fact, from day to day, we all may wrestle with a handful of them. But if the strain is a day after day, month after month battle, a loving senior living community like Frontida Assisted Living Homes may be the relief you need.

Call Frontida today to see how we can help.

Need to talk with family about senior living options? Check out these other helpful posts on choosing an assisted living facility and making the transition easier.

Thank you to Huy Phan on Unsplash for the featured image

Elizabeth Daghfal is a writer, teacher, speaker, and community volunteer. When she isn't teaching or writing-- Who are we kidding? Her husband and five kids say she's ALWAYS teaching and writing. She has a passion to help people who are struggling and is happy to say her shoulders are drip-dry. Born and raised in the South, she now lives in Wisconsin and loves it--except for the fifteen months of winter. Read more about her at elizabethdaghfal.com.