Additional Resources Mentioned
Takeaways
We shared 3 tips:
Tip 1: Evaluate your situation
Tip 2: Reach out for help
Tip 3: Create a strategy
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Full Episode Transcript
Sue & Nancy: Have you ever heard of a certified senior advisor? Would you even know what you needed or how to find one? In this episode, Sue and I are talking with Cynthia Perthuis of Senior Care Authority about finding, evaluating, and implementing solutions along the caregiving journey.
We’re sharing three tips.
If you’re following along with the Navigating Dementia Caregiving Roadmap, this aligns with step eight. And you’ll be able to find the roadmap as a downloadable digital guide on the guides page of our website. And we’ve also created it as an interactive page on our website. Cynthia, welcome. We are so grateful to have you here today. You’re the principal owner of Senior Care Authority in Southwest Florida. Please tell us more, Cynthia, about what you do and what we’re talking about today.
Cynthia: Sure, so a couple of things I like to use in a description and introduction about myself is, first off, my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and my mother, unbeknownst to us, had a little bit of Parkinson’s in 2008. And in 2008, I worked in New York City. I had a family. I had a child in college, one going to boarding school. I had a lot going on. And I didn’t really have the time in my mind or the understanding of how to care for my parents who lived 1,500 miles away. So once they had passed away and because of my age, my friends were calling me saying, what did you do with your father? What did you do with your mother? I saw that as a business opportunity of a way that I could help people who were just like me. Because if I think about it, I really wish I had had someone just like me now to help me through this journey. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I didn’t know how to take care of my parents. I wanted the best for them, but I couldn’t figure it out. And partly that’s because there’s a lot of confusion about what kinds of resources are out there to help you when you feel like something needs to change with your loved one, but you’re not really sure what it is or how to do it. So why don’t we just jump right into the podcast and we can talk about it.
Sue & Nancy: That’s awesome. Let’s go because that’s what we’re going to talk about here. Tip one is to first evaluate your situation as best you can.
Cynthia: Sure, so let’s think about what that situation might look like. That situation may be just some things that change on a regular basis that you can’t really get your arms around. You can’t touch it, you can’t define it, you can’t put it into words, but you know something is wrong. And those things might be as simple as difficulty with making meals. I know that I would go to my parents’ home and I remember at Thanksgiving one day, we went to Thanksgiving dinner and my parents had prepared Thanksgiving dinner the day before. And my mother was an amazing cook. And we go there and she prepares and serves us warmed up dressing. You know how when you warm up the dressing or warm up a food, it’s kind of crunchy around the edges? That was our Thanksgiving dinner was a crunchy edged dressing. And we knew there was something wrong, but we couldn’t figure it out.
Or maybe when you go to see your parents or your loved one — and remember, we’re not talking about just parents here. We’re talking about parents, loved ones, neighbors, people you go to church with, people you know — but maybe you go and they just don’t smell right. Like they haven’t had a bath. Now I’m not talking about the fact that they have some food on their shirts, because we all, as we get older, get some food on our shirts, right? But maybe they have the food on their shirts and they had it on that exact same shirt on Monday and on Tuesday and on Wednesday and on Thursday. It’s just not really right. Or you think they’re taking their medication because you ask them, have you taken your medication? And yeah, they say, I take my medication. And then all of a sudden you find that there’s one of those pills in the dog bowl because maybe it fell off the counter. Whatever medication they were taking, they don’t seem to be reacting to it the way they should be reacting. Those are some subtle little changes and everyday things.
You might also figure out that it’s a challenge to try to support them. My parents, again, 1,500 miles away, they lived alone with each other, and we weren’t sure — are they taking their medication? Are they driving when they shouldn’t be driving? Are they doing things when we’re not there that they shouldn’t be doing? We realized when we would go visit them that maybe they were, because my dad, every time I went to visit him, was on the phone with the cable guy, even though I had put a sign that said do not unplug the TV.
Maybe you’re oblivious to all of this. I, in the beginning, was oblivious to all of it because I lived so far away and I was so busy, but the neighbors would call me, the financial planner called me and said, your dad has bought a car three days in a row. And I said, what do you mean he’s bought a car three days in a row? He hadn’t really bought the car, but he’d taken the money out of the account three days in a row. And they would say, why are you taking this money out? He said, I’m buying a car. And so they called us to tell us that maybe there was something wrong.
Maybe things just feel off. And you’re not sure what it is, but your parents, your loved one, your neighbor, your friend, just isn’t the person that they used to be or that you know them. And those are things that just kind of sneak up on you.
Maybe there’s something more dramatic. Maybe there is an emergency situation. Your parent, loved one, person that you are caring about — they’ve fallen, they’ve broken something, they’ve injured something. Maybe they have had an infection that caused them to be delusional or have some type of hallucinations and they’re in the hospital. That’s an emergency because you know that that’s a line that’s kind of been drawn that it’s not going to be the same after.
Something else that we see is that our loved ones may begin to be very anxious and agitated about aging. They get upset with small little things and they just don’t know how to do small little things. So the most common thing I see and the most common thing I hear when families call me is they say, my mother is fully independent. She can do everything. And I’m like, that’s great. Talk to me about why you’re calling me. Well, a lot of times you’re calling me because mom’s not playing bridge anymore because she’s telling us that everybody cheats. Dad’s not playing golf anymore — everybody cheats. Maybe they have dings on their cars and they don’t really know where those dings came from. The rearview mirror is missing. They’ve gotten lost. They have been scammed. This is a nation full of people being scammed. Their electricity has been turned off — maybe not because they didn’t have the money, but because they forgot to pay, or they lost track, or they don’t know how to write a check any longer. Those are things that can become emergencies, and that is when you need to find somebody, which is going to lead us to our next tip.
Sue & Nancy: Which is, there comes a point in time when it’s clear that something has to change. That you just, as you said, something feels wrong and you want to investigate options but you’re not really sure what to do. And so this is where having a service you can reach out to can really help and that’s tip two, reach out for help.
Cynthia: So in reaching out for help, I think that we’re a society that wants to keep everything close to the chest, if you will, and we don’t want people to know that we need help. And that happens to people of all ages, but it especially happens with parents. They don’t want you to think that they need help because they’re the parent. Well, there are different types of models of help that you might receive. And I’m just going to lay out three of them.
One of them might be a referral service, or a placement service as they’re called, or a certified senior advisor as we mentioned earlier. So referral services are services that can refer you to other people that might be able to help you. They have a list, it’s in a database, you tell them your zip code, they refer your name out and then those people call you to find out how they can help you. And that’s okay in some situations.
A little bit further in depth with that is what would be termed a placement service. You’ve made a decision to move your loved one someplace and you need a little bit more help. So a placement service can help you really fine tune and hone in on the exact place where you might need to live if that’s the decision you’re going to make.
And then something that comes from my world is a certified senior advisor. And those people run a little bit higher level and fly high over what we have identified as 31 different types of people you might need in this journey. And those are as esoteric and as simple as you might need a dog walker or a pet sitter because your loved one has a pet, but they’re not walking that pet or feeding that pet. But you don’t want to take that pet away. You might need someone who can teach a specialty program for Parkinson’s — there’s a program called Rock Steady Boxing and they can come to your home and help the person with Parkinson’s with memory and with movement. There are daily money managers who pay your bills. There are elder law attorneys who can help you get your papers in order. There are housekeepers. There are people who will come to your home and cut your hair, shave you, do a manicure or pedicure. Again, 31 different types of people. And a certified senior advisor flies high over all of that and helps you figure out not only which of those people you might need, but who specifically you might need in that industry.
As a certified senior advisor, I have a database that is really endless of people who can provide these things — people I have experience with, who have worked with our clients, who are certified and licensed if they need to be. The bottom line is, you don’t have to know what to do. You don’t have to know when to do it and you don’t have to know who to call to do it. We specialize in helping you make a plan. And if you want to find a certified senior advisor in your area, you can contact me — that information will be in the podcast description — or you can go to csa.us, and that link will also be in the podcast description.
Sue & Nancy: Cynthia, you raise a really good point, which is each of us is going to have a different inflection point or a series of inflection points that are going to draw us to knowing that we need additional assistance. I’ll tell you one of the most significant inflection points for me. When you were talking about communities where we could move our loved ones, I recognized I was going to need to move my husband into a care community. As I began looking at it on my own, I’d asked people and gotten a list of things I wanted to look at and I’m thinking I’m going to do all this on my own. One of the things I learned is no two of them have the same financial model. So I would go and I would be able to look at what the rooms were going to be like. I could find all the other information, but I couldn’t figure out how to compare what the investment would be with this one or this one or this one. When I reached out to a senior care advisor, they were like, okay, we can make this an apples to apples comparison instead of a fruit basket. And so that inflection point saved me an incredible amount of time and energy and effort because there were short-term decisions as well as long-term decisions that were impacted.
Cynthia: So one of the things that we do a lot of work with is what I term family mediation. When I get a phone call from a client, many times what I hear is we don’t have enough money and we have a really dysfunctional family. And I just basically say to them, welcome to the United States of America, because everybody’s got something in their closet. So again, we help them work with the money side of it, but we also help them with the family, because maybe you have four or five children and in this world that we live in, we have yours, mine and ours. We have halves and steps and all of those people have their own idea of what they want to have happen. And we have to help all of those people figure out what is best, not just for each individual, not just for their parents in this example, but what is helpful and best for their entire family unit.
And so the older sister traditionally will say, I’ve got it, I’ll take care of mom. She may be in Timbuktu, but she’s going to come live with me in Pittsburgh. And that might not be what’s best for the daughter’s family or for the parents. There’s also one of my favorite lines: I promised I would not put her somewhere. I promised my parents I would help them stay at home. And what we believe and what I think is really true is that that promise may have sounded like I promised you I won’t do this, but what you were really promising is I will take care of you. I promised you that you will have a roof over your head. You’ll be warm and cared for. You will be loved. You will be fed. You will be taken care of from a health standpoint. That is what I promise you. But we don’t know what it looks like. We didn’t know what that was coming when we stood at the altar and promised to love and cherish until death do we part. We don’t know what it means to our parent when they say, don’t you put me someplace. And as I try to explain to my clients, we’re not putting anyone any place. We are going to help them find a place where they’re cared for and where they’re loved.
Something else — most of the people that I speak to have a list of items that their neighbors have told them or that ChatGPT has told them. Here’s what you need to do. You need to see if it smells like urine. You need to find out what the ratio of caregiver to resident is. You need to try the food. I will tell you that in the majority of communities, you will never smell urine because there are these new things called aromatherapy diffusers — these communities use that. You’re not going to smell that any longer. So when you go into a community and say, this is the one, it doesn’t smell bad — most of them don’t smell bad anymore. So you can’t really use that. If you go in and say, I want to know what the ratio of employees to residents is, there’s a law in every state that you have to have a certain ratio. Every place that’s licensed is going to use that number. What you don’t understand is do they count the bus driver? Do they count the kitchen staff? Do they count them in that ratio? They might. So if you have someone who is an expert and does this all day, every day, they can help you with the places that are very truthful with what they’re saying, help you understand the management, help you understand things that are not on ChatGPT. Because if you looked up the questions to ask the community, so did the community.
Sue & Nancy: Those are such awesome examples of exactly what we were talking about, which is having an expert in the middle of it who does this all day every day. And that’s actually what tip three is about — once you do find an expert to help you, tip three is you’re going to create a strategy together. So tell us a little bit about what that looks like.
Cynthia: Sure, so strategy is a great word. In fact, we are called senior advisors, but we also call ourselves elder care strategists. We’re helping you figure out what a strategy is. And so to do that, we want a full assessment. We want to understand everything about the person that you’re trying to help. What’s the name of their dog or their cat? What did they do for a living? Where did they go to school? Where did they grow up? What makes them find joy? You need to understand the person you’re trying to help so that you can relay that information to the professionals that you’re working with.
And then I mentioned it earlier and I’ll mention it again — the where, the when and the how. You need to figure out where. You can figure out where today. But you need to figure out a couple of where’s because when that time comes, things may have changed — both with your family and with your situation, and with the place you’ve chosen. Maybe they’re full, maybe they’ve got a new management team, maybe they’re not as great as they used to be. So figure out the where. But in doing that, you don’t have to get real caught up in how are we going to change our mailing address, when is the housekeeper going to come, what do I do with all the first grade papers I have in storage from my children. All of those things can be figured out later. We can figure out the when and the how later.
But once you figure out where, we can help you put a strategy together for how you’re going to pay for it. This is something that people worry about. I don’t have enough money. We try to help you find money. And there are hidden pockets of money in all sorts of different places. That’s part of what we’re able to do in that strategy.
There’s also a strategy of staying at home. People say, I want to stay at home. What’s the strategy? What are you going to do if something happens to you? Let’s just say you’re a couple. What if something happens to the caregiver for an hour? What if something happens to the caregiver for four hours? What if something happens to the caregiver for a week? What is the strategy? What’s the plan? Who’s going to step in? Who’s going to help? Those are the things that we can work with. And then who do you need to put that strategy into place? Which of those 31 people do we really need to call on to help make your strategy work — again, for you and the whole family unit and the whole community that is surrounding this person that you’re concerned about.
Sue & Nancy: And that really gets to the I don’t know what I don’t know. And having somebody who can ask the questions that we don’t know the answers to — I know that one of the paths that I took was I wanted to keep my husband at home. And we did the same thing with my dad and we did the same thing with my grandmother. We started out with, we want to keep them at home. And that was our lens, that was our focus. And then as we talked to other people, we’re like, we’re learning these are the pros and cons. These are the choices that you need to make. These are the risks. And it helped us change. We kept my grandmother at home. My dad, we were able to keep at home longer. And my husband, we knew that there was a transition point where the wisest choice — and it was for my health as well. I hadn’t been considering my health. I’d been considering his health, and part of our decision when talking to someone else was my health as well. And so it really is important to have someone with you who can ask you the questions that you don’t know to ask.
Sue & Nancy: Cynthia, thank you so very much for sharing all of these valuable tips and the variety of different things for us to be considering today. Please tell our listeners how they can find you, how can they find your business.
Cynthia: So first, I also want to tell you thank you. I look for every opportunity that I can get and find to help educate people so that they don’t go through the journey that I went through. It was a long and grueling journey to help my parents. We hadn’t talked about it. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. And I wanted to do the best for my parents. And sometimes I felt like I was not. I didn’t have the right tools to be able to do what was best for my parents. So I really appreciate you, your podcast and what you’re helping people understand because this is something that we need to speak about and remove the stigma of aging and the stigma of dying. So if you want to reach out to me, you can find me at www.scannyfl.com — SCAN stands for Senior Care Authority — and there’s a contact us form, you can find me, we have a lot of content on that website and I would welcome talking to anyone. I talk to people all day, every day and I would love to have you call me and just tell me your story.
Sue & Nancy: Thank you. Thank you, Cynthia. Let’s summarize. Thank you so much for discussing what a Senior Care Advisor is and what they do and how they can help us. We all learned a lot. We really appreciate it. And of course, today we shared three tips. Tip number one, evaluate your situation. Tip number two, reach out for help. And tip number three, create a strategy. All sound like good tips to me.
If you have tips about how to use or leverage Senior Care Advisors, please share those on our Facebook page, our Instagram page. The links are in the podcast description. If you like this podcast, please follow it, subscribe to it, and share it with your friends. We really, really appreciate it. All of our podcasts have matching blogs, which effectively is us taking the notes for you. So find the number of this podcast and go on our website, find a blog with the exact same number. It’s effectively a blog that discusses everything we talked about in this podcast and you can leverage it for notes.
This podcast is associated with step eight in the Navigating Dementia Caregiving Roadmap, which you can find on the guides page of our website and download your own version. And there’s also an interactive roadmap page on our website where you can go in, click on step eight and you’ll see the links to everything we’re talking about here. We’re all on this journey together.
