Parent Sudden Disablement (hopefully temporary), Looking for Advice
Hey Y'all,
I am looking for advice on my current situation. I (24M) am trying to navigate dealing with a sudden disablement that has hapened to my mother. My mother is pretty young (57) and lives on her own and stuff. She hasn't been in the best situation financially speaking for a long time at this point, but that is unrelated I mainly say that to say that I have been been helping her on and off with rent ocassionaly sense I was in high school. I also make this known to set the stage that there are no job benefits for her to be found / no income while she is injured.
About a month and a half ago she was getting up to go to the restroom in her apartment and fell. She is also a pretty big hoarder so this fall is not just a fall to the ground but seems to have been a pretty severe fall with her hitting multiple items in her apartment (different totes and stuff).
She was not able to move after having this fall and had to use siri to call someone in her apartment to help. Eventually they called 911 and she went to the hospital. The hospital closest to her is a private hospital, she has a insurance plan directly with the public hospital in the area (which is the better hospital regardless) which the private one doesn't accept of course, but they had to at lease treat and diagnoise her. She was there for about 4 days, where we ultimately found out this fall cause some pretty bad damage to her cervical spine. I'm an engineer not a doctor so if I get anything wrong please forgive me here, but basically what I understand is that as we get older our spines start to narrow in general, so we are more prone to damage and such.
This combined with the hard fall caused some brusing and compression on 2 parts of her cervical spine, which caused her to present with symptoms like reduced motor funcationality, not being able to walk well, not being able to write, etc... They said she would need a PCDF procedure, and apologized as they would do it there right then but the ER and Ortho / Neuro departments are disconnected and due to her insurance situation the surgical department would just reject her transfer.
At this time her situation was degraded, but still pretty manageable. She was walking around normally for the most part, a little bit of a gait and still couldn't really write / would drop things, but main issues were on her left side. I took back the car I got her as the doctor said she couldn't drive, and we scheduled an appointment to see her PCP that same week.
We make it to her PCP and her PCP is pretty concerned, recommends to go to the ER. We take her to the ER for the public hospital, she gets admitted and they confirm the same thing. By this point her symptoms were getting worse and the hospitial initally was not going to release her on her own.
Side note: For personal reasons and other items I won't go into, my mother and I's relationship is pretty strained. I have my only family to worry about and take care of and I am not comfortable with my mom living with me for example, so that was not and is still an option I am actively looking to avoid. I am also doing decently financially, but all of that is from my wife and I's current succes, no passed down money or anything and we are young so I don't have a war chest to really tap into, just cashflow.
She eventually got some funcationailty back with some PT and was able to be released on her own with a walker.
Now fast forward to this past week, I went to pick her up to take her to PT to find that her situation seems to have gotten a lot worse. She has fallen multiple more times, she can barely walk even with the walker and is having a really hard time grabbing things. I take her to PT and the PT doesn't do anything as he is concerned with the worsening of her symptoms, stating that these are signs of more compression and recommends going to the ER as the surgery she has scheduled is to far out.
That puts us to current day, she got admitted this weekend, and the doctors are currently trying to move up her schedule with it possibly being as soon as next week.
That is all background, I say that to give context for my real questions.
My understanding from all of the doctors is that this surgery is not actually a simple fix item (nor is any spine surgey as I understand). This will fuse her sping and decompress it, but there is no guarantee she gets functionaility back. They are optimistic but there is no guarantee. They are also saying she will need specific care and such after the surgery and will continue to need it until she (hopefully) recovers from the surgery and regains her abilities which they also say can take about a full year to really understand what is going on.
I have 2 sisters, both of which are more or less useless and don't want to help at all. I personally wouldn't be helping either if it weren't for the feeling of moral obligation. She wasn't a bad mom at all, we just ended up in some pretty situations in the later half of my youth and she was never able to really recover.
I don't really know where I have gone with this, kind of ranted / rambled into a tangent, but going to bring it home.
My wife and I currently have 2 houses. One of which we live in and another one being a rental duplex.
My wife and I decided that the best solution of items would be to move out of the house we currently live (it was always going to be another rental property, just a basic starter home) and buy another house that will also eventually be another rental. The house we currently live in has a ADU in the back that we actually use to rent out for money a few years ago and now just use as a home office. We are planning to allow for her to live there and rent out the front of the house to a family member (hopefully), if not just a normal person to offset the incurred cost. This is the most financially viable situation (that involves helping her) as we would lose to much money on the duplex. This situation roughly maths out to a net neutral before you include the help for stuff like groceeries and such. We found another house in the same neighborhood that will be a good rental property, we are going to move there for a few years while we pay down the other mortages and then save up for our actual home upgrade.
I guess I just want to understand or get peoples opinions on if that is a good idea or not? I don't feel like there is any good option in this situation right now, they all feel pretty bad, but I have choosen the option that feels the least financially affecting + least personally affecting. I obviously could have moved my mom into the studio with us still living here and that would be the least financially affecting, but it would also be way to emotionally affecting and don't want it to lead to issues in my marriage at all. Not worried about my wife, she is a sweetheart, but my mom and I truly have issues.
I am also curious if anyone has had anyone go through this surgery, what did they look like after coming out? I'm worried that if items don't go well and she doesn't get better the only next item would be something like assisted living, which feels insane because littlerally last month she was perfectly fine, a normal adult living on her own working and scraping by like usual.
anyways, if you made it this far and I didn't make to many typos I appreciate it, I might just be ranting but I'm also just curious for any feedback or insights into others situations if you have delt with something like this. Thank you!