Goings ons

[susandennis]

Last night I met jwg and rsc at Bateau for a wonderful dinner and catch up. We had the chef's menu which was wonderful plus no decisions. Among other things, they recently moved into a continuing care retirement center and I had questions - lots of questions and all their answers were very positive.

My plan is to drop dead long before I need to move into one but... on the off chance that my plan fails, I really need to start investigating.

The Seattle leg of their trip involves Red Sox baseball. The game last night started shortly after we sat down to dinner. They have a rule that says they will not look at game progress before or during dinner. They let me check if I promised a poker face. I promised. And it was 1-1 for a long long time.

It was still 1-1 when we spit up. Me to my Lyft ride and the two of them to the streets to walk back to their hotel. They refused my ride. The Mariners got another run before I got home.

I was able to catch the last two innings at home and while we won, it turned into a stressful battle. And then, of course I couldn't get to sleep. But, I finally did and woke up not much later than usual. I toyed with skipping the swim but realized that I will likely want to skip it tomorrow so I went.

So glad I did. It was a very good swim and on a high traffic day. Street traffic, not pool traffic but both turned out to be fine. Now that I have two different routes home, I can choose the less popular one and it works out fine. Like it did today.

Tale of two retails.

I returned an item to Amazon on the 26th. Ordinarily, when UPS picks it up, Amazon issues a refund. This time they did not. Plus, now it looks like it's stuck somewhere in the UPS system. Finally today I got onto chat (not really an easy feat but always very satisfactory once you get an agent) and the agent made the refund and fixed it all. I actually haven't seen the refund yet, but past experience says it will be there tomorrow.

I got an email from Google. It was a generic hardware return email. They will send me a warranty replacement once I send them back mine. They sent a label. There was several paragraphs warning me to reset it before I sent it back. It's dead. I can't do shit with it. THEN 30 minutes later I get another email saying don't use the first label, use this one. And reset the watch. OH and they use FedEx which is the LEAST convenient shipper for me. Bite me Google. Just bite me.

But, hey, we beat the Red Sox last night. So life does not suck.

John and Robert are going to come here tonight and we'll go to the game together. I'm really looking forward to it.

I need to take a shower and then take the damn watch to the Fed Ex box which - Fed Ex's website says is in the next block. We shall see.

Comments

[arlie]

So, I googled "continuing care retirement center" and it seems to be some sort of frightfully expensive living arrangement that allows one to start in a mostly normal apartment setting, progressing downward through "assisted living" and "skilled nursing care."

I'm so with you about planning to drop dead before I need to move into any place that requires me to give up significant autonomy or requires me to rely on insufficient, incompetent, or otherwise problematic help.

That's a lot more scary than dying, from where I sit.

[susandennis]

Sounds like it's a good thing you aren't me

[rsc]

It's definitely pricy, but the point is not that you have to "progress downward", but rather that if you do there's support available. Until that point, you can live an entirely independent life, and there's a community at hand to make as much or as little use of as you like. There are services available that you may or may not find useful, but in general whether you "give up significant autonomy" is entirely up to you.

My parents moved into such a place when they were 76 and 77, and it was one of the best decisions they ever made. They both had occasion to use the skilled nursing facility at some point, and it was absolutely a godsend that it was on the premises.

[arlie]

I could have punctuated that comment better. The bit about hoping to die before becoming helpless was the main point. The rest was supposed to be an addendum about "what on earth is a continuing care retirement center anyway?" But that's not the way it came out.

I'm currently retired and living in my (paid off) single family home, and slowly changing things in ways that will make it a bit more elderly-friendly. Ideally I'd stay here for the rest of my life, but reworking this place to handle some possible disabilities would be very difficult. And it's more convenient for paid caregivers to have all their clients/patients in one place. If I'm lucky, I'll die at home, like my father and aunt (hospice care at home) or go from my home straight to a separate hospice (like my mother).

If I'm not lucky, I'll have a long period without most of the activities I enjoy, eating food I don't prefer (because I can't make my own), surrounded by more people than my introversion and autistic spectrum disorder can handle without being in chronic distress. If I'm very unlucky, my decisions will be being made for me by people who presume I'd want what they think they would want - except they are conventionally minded extraverts. I imagine myself dressed femme for almost the first time in my life, plunked down in front of a TV set in a lounge full of others as disabled as myself, unable to protest that the clothes hurt and the noise is making me crazy. And *that* is all without any kind of elder abuse scenario, just well-meaning-but-clueless caregivers, or even well-meaning-but-overworked.

[rsc]

OK. One of the reasons we chose to make this move when we did (last November) is that living in our three-story house required us to go up and down stairs a lot, and while this is not a problem for us now, that could change, perhaps quite quickly (I'm 77 and John is 84). So we decided to follow the conventional wisdom of :"When you can, not when you have to". I don't claim that what we thought was right for us is necessarily right for anyone else.

Oh, and... "CCRC" stands for "Continuing Care Retirement Community".

[arlie]

You probably did the right thing for you. Or at least a right thing. (Of course it's not my place to judge in any case.)

I'm still (only) 65, as is my housemate. And we only have a few stairs - we can't get in or out of the house without navigating 2 or 3 steps, but once inside we can get everywhere except the basement on one level. So I (probably) have time, and there's at least some chance I'll go the way of the similarly-aged friend I used to discuss these things with - she died of a cardiac event in March, going from able-to-call-911 to unconscious-and-unable-to-be-revived in the brief time it took the EMTs to arrive. (OTOH, my family history suggests that what finally gets me will be cancer, not circulatory system issues.)

Mostly though, I'm in denial, even as I already have had periods where I briefly needed (minimal) help with activities of daily living, which have forced me to at least start admitting "yes, this could happen to me". So far, my housemate has been able to do the things I cannot do, and vice versa. I drive her wherever she needs to go, and make phone calls for things she can't do by email; she opens jars and moves objects too heavy for me to manage. And we hire people to do maintenance tasks I used to do myself.