Some medical issues aren’t obvious. They build slowly in ways that are easy to ignore if you’re the one experiencing them. That’s the trouble: those are the situations in which checking in really does make a difference between someone being stable or someone being in crisis.
Chronic health conditions, in other words, require stability. Not just the stability that comes from taking a pill at a particular time. Or checking blood sugar levels when the mood strikes. But stability and attention all day every day in more ways than one. This is where people living alone really start to struggle even if everything else is going well in their lives.
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Blood Sugar Stability That Doesn’t Sabotage
Diabetes is one of those situations that requires constant attention. The problem is that people get tired of paying attention. They get tired of planning every meal around blood sugar levels. They get tired of calculating their insulin dosage over and over and over again. When someone is living alone, it’s all too easy to get lazy about it. Skip a reading here and there. Skip portion sizes when they think “good enough” is good enough. Maybe they just forget whether they took their medications an hour ago.
There’s nothing theoretical about what can happen when someone lets their diabetes slip. The complications come on quickly and they come on ugly. Vision complications. Nerve complications. Sores that don’t heal and turn into something nasty. What keeps these complications in check is not just knowledge, but something else altogether: consistency, every time it’s time to do something.
Daily check-ins catch all those little issues that build up with the same person doing the management. Maybe blood sugars keep bumping up after breakfast because portion sizes have bumped up too over the last few months.
Maybe someone keeps forgetting their evening medication because they’re not sure whether they took it; when someone checks in, it becomes all too apparent to both parties what’s happening and what needs to happen. For families facing this situation, services like Home Care York PA help avoid this pitfall, making diabetes something families can manage rather than something that ruins their lives.
Heart Conditions That Need Weight Check-Ins
Congestive heart failure is another situation that isn’t visible until it is. The body starts collecting fluid, but it does so gradually enough that it starts to seem “normal” to be a little more tired than usual, a little more swollen than usual, a little more short of breath than usual. By the time the signs are hard to ignore, it’s too late.
Daily weight check-ins catch this before it becomes a full-blown emergency. A few pounds of weight gain here and a few pounds there over a few days doesn’t seem like much when it’s just one thing as one factor. When someone checks in every day, it becomes noticeable and treatable before the window closes. The daily variations in weight when the disease process really starts to make itself known happen on extremes.
One of the saddest things about all this is that it has to be caught before someone needs to see their doctors; at this point, hospital admission is the only option. The last thing anyone wants is for their loved one already struggling with a chronic condition to end up in the hospital for something that could have been avoided entirely.
Medication Management That Trips People Up
Once someone has five or more different pills they need to take, it’s not an unusual occurrence for older adults, medication management becomes complicated in its own right.
Morning medications need to be taken with morning breakfast but not anything else that comes in another container that needs to be taken on an empty stomach later in the day. It’s really a lot to keep up with. And this is especially true when folks aren’t as sharp as they used to be.
Medication mistakes send thousands of older adults to the emergency room each year. Mistakes like taking too much of something because they can’t remember whether they took it in the first place. Mistakes like taking something that can’t be taken together with something else because their minds are focused on other things.
It’s one thing when medication management becomes complicated; it’s another when those who manage medications forget that containers need to be emptied and addressed and not just looked at from a distance.
Daily check-ins mean someone can actually address each pill separately instead of hoping for the best and catch mistakes before they happen instead of hoping for the best.
Mobility Issues Get Dangerous Fast
Coordination issues increase with age; it’s hard enough if folks are older and learning to live with changes to their bodies, but even worse if they’re cognitively adapting (instead of physically) to changes in their bodies or abilities instead of doing what they used to do to stay physically active and agile.
The trouble is that the adaptations have negative effects on mobility and balance. Seniors who cognitively adapt stop moving. They stop exercising. They stop walking because they’re afraid they’re going to fall.
This cycle has negative effects, and it accelerates quicker than most people realize without someone else checking in on them. What might have been manageable mobility challenges three months ago might now seem impossible now for something as simple as moving from one room in your home to another.
Daily check-ins mean someone can realistically plan for mobility challenges as opposed to what they actually can do; this is especially important when it comes to high-risk activities like showering, standing up in the morning, and walking down stairs.
Isolation Is Dangerous Too
Social isolation, an illness in itself, makes physical illnesses worse; people who live alone become even less isolated faster than most chronic medical conditions.
Daily contact with someone helps connect seniors physically as well as cognitively. It might seem silly but having someone to talk to keeps seniors thinking. Having someone to talk to who cares about them means they mention things, symptoms (or lack of symptoms) they might normally disregard when they’re talking to themselves.
The mental health aspects of chronic physical conditions get overlooked for some reason. Someone with diabetes or a cardiovascular condition dealing with loneliness likely has more going on than just diabetes or heart issues; daily check ins mean their mental health isn’t neglected and attention can be paid to catching up rather than contemplating building future challenges.
When Symptoms Change Quickly
Part of being stable with chronic illnesses and common mental illnesses, for that matter, is that people become stable after a while. But stability dissolves quickly when someone’s been doing well for a while.
Daily check-ins keep people from getting caught unaware by someone who’s going downhill quick; when someone’s been managing a chronic condition for years it’s hard (but not impossible) to see someone feeling poorly once again.
What usually makes it worse is catching chronic condition comorbidities like this before it’s too late; when it comes to heart conditions, for example, any change should be caught quickly enough for medication adjustments instead of hospital admissions.
The conditions that benefit from daily attention aren’t necessarily serious conditions; rather it’s situations where folks need constant attention but only get attention when something’s built up (instead of nothing else).
