Life can be ugly and unpredictable: Pick a husband who will last — and laugh with you — a lifetime

The first time I introduced Skip to my parents, I knew I wanted to marry him.

It was October 1998 and my future husband was not in peak form.

He — like his mother and most everyone on her Hungarian side of the family — had developed a painful cyst at the base of his spine. A few days earlier, a doctor carved a 4-inch zig-zag incision, scooped out the culprit and sewed Skip back up with what looked like an embroidered lightning bolt emerging from the top of his butt crack.

It wasn’t pretty.

And Skip was in pain. By the time we pulled into my parents’ driveway, he was ashen and sitting side-saddle because leaning against the driver’s seat hurt too much.

My mom, I had warned Skip, had no social boundaries. None. She was nosy, touchy and, at times, a wee bit raunchy. But she could also be witty and disarmingly charming.

When mom saw Skip limping up the back stairs, she greeted him with a smile and an innocuous question: “What’s the matter?”

Skip explained about the cyst.

And before Skip could shake my father’s hand, mom walloped him with round two — the inappropriate question, the one I was certain would come even though I couldn’t predict the circumstances or the timing — “Can I see it?”

Skip, without hesitation, unbuckled his belt, dropped his jeans and let mom peel down the dressing so she could marvel at his wounded anatomy.

“Herm,” mom said to my father, “come here, you have to see this.”

My dad, politely averting his eyes, declined and asked Skip — in manly solidarity — if he wanted a beer.

Skip and I were in our early 30s then. My parents were in their late 60s. None of us could have imagined what the future held. But that moment — and the hours that followed — set the tone for all the years that followed, including the past three since my parents moved in with us.

Many readers of this blog have left messages and sent emails of encouragement to me. They say I am brave to help my parents and that my parents are lucky to have me.

But the truth is, my parents are lucky to have my husband.

If Skip didn’t support me — financially and emotionally — I couldn’t help my parents. He also pitches in daily to get things done. Today, on his day off, he took mom on a field trip to the library and listened patiently as she yammered on with two people she knew — even after those people seemed to lose interest.

How many books and movies — both comic and tragic – have been penned about Romeo and Juliet relationships doomed by quarreling or misfit Meet the Focker families? There’s a reason.

Even if you find a soul mate, a lover, a best friend, you’re destined for trouble if your match doesn’t fit with your family. Yes, couples can muddle through. And, for some, family isn’t as important. But I knew, particularly as an only child, that my husband would need both the right mindset and sense of humor to not only cope with my family, but to be happy with me.

I was already in love with Skip before I took him home to meet my parents. But as that day wore on — without tension, only laughter — I knew I would be his wife.

After mom re-bandaged his incision and Skip hoisted up his jeans, mom, who has no science or medical training, told Skip that his cyst wasn’t hereditary.

It was, she declared, his unborn twin.

Mom, now with dad on her side, told the story of a man they knew in Florida who had the same sort of cyst. When doctors operated, they found hair, tiny teeth and bones. Doctors concluded that the man’s body formed the cyst to expel the remains of a twin he had unknowingly carried with him for decades since birth.

Skip didn’t argue. He didn’t talk about all of his family members with the same issue. Or that, thankfully, his doctors did not report finding any teeth lodged above his butt crack.

Only later, when we were alone, did we laugh, not realizing at the time that his lightning-bolt scar would forever be known in our family as “twin.”

Would grandma and grandpa trade their driving privileges for private car service to the grocery, the doc?

Almost every day I take my dad to radiation, I spy an old person behind the wheel of a car or SUV who I suspect shouldn’t be driving.

I see men and women in their 80s and 90s emerge slowly from their driver-side doors, unfolding themselves and their walkers for agonizing and unsteady walks inside. Other older drivers unknowingly block the entrance to the medical building, parking at weird angles while waiting for another old person — usually even more feeble — to crawl into the passenger side.

I’ve also witnessed elderly drivers cut off semi-trucks when they pull out of the medical center onto the road. And I once saw an old man with wrap-around, goggle-type sunglasses turn left onto the highway like he was in London, staying on the wrong side of the road until a blaring horn prompted him to steer right.

Many old people have no options to get where they’re going. Others shun the options they do have (my parents, for instance, would rather independently ride a pogo stick through the snow than take a prescheduled public transport bus with strangers).

Today, Cleveland’s newspaper and Plain Dealer reporter Karen Farkas offer a different option that could work for some (here’s a link to the story: http://tinyurl.com/mjuqdjl).

The University of Cincinnati has partnered with a nonprofit group to pair its students with older people who don’t drive.

The students can bank credits for driving the oldsters to doctors’ appointments and groceries and anywhere else they need to go. And the old people get private, door-to-door transport by paying dues to a nonprofit for the service — dues that can often be paid in full when the old person sells his/her car.

The program, Driving Community Connections, is supported by the Ohio Department of Aging and the Ohio Board of Regents.

It’s only a pilot program at one university.

And the story doesn’t answer some important questions — like whether the student drivers are vetted or insured.

But it does raise the possibility of a new way of caring for the aged when people get creative.

Is it better to be tied to a tree than squashed on the freeway? Caregiver angst

Baby Walter — that’s what everyone called him since his dad was also named Walter and no one much liked the sound of “junior” — spent most of his single-digit years tethered to one heavy object or another.

His older sister Tina was one of my closest friends. We grew up in the 1970s and 1980s at different ends of the same rural road in Ohio, an unlined swath of blacktop connecting old farmhouses to the fields of green soybeans and sweet corn planted in between.

Baby Walter and Tina lived in the last house on the right before our road crossed over Interstate 71, the busy freeway connecting Cleveland to Columbus to Cincinnati.

And Tina’s mom — not overly protective of Tina or her older brother — worried constantly that Baby Walter would run down the slope of their side yard and onto I-71 where he would almost certainly be smashed by a semi-truck hauling automobiles or steel or some other heavy thing manufactured in Cleveland and destined for points south unknown.

Today, a doctor would likely diagnose Baby Walter with ADD and scribble out a prescription for a medication to calm him. But at that time, our patch of Ohio was stuck somewhere between “Hee Haw” and “Jesus Christ Superstar.”

We rarely questioned our fate and, if we did, we asked God via Jesus to help us, not some stranger in a lab coat. On rare occasions — like those Sundays when our preacher wrapped up his sermon in time to catch Browns kickoff — we knew God kicked in. But mostly, we fended for ourselves and worked with what we had.

That meant it was Tina’s job — and my job, too, when I was at her house — to keep Baby Walter safe by following instructions from Tina’s mom:

Tie Baby Walter to his bed for his nap.

Tie Baby Walter to the barn ladder while you’re in the loft so he doesn’t fall.

Tie Baby Walter to the tree so you all can play outside.

I know it sounds wretched now and certainly there were many what-ifs — like what if the house caught fire and Baby Walter was trapped, unable to leave his bed. But nothing bad ever happened.

Baby Walter would inevitably wrap himself around the tree like a tether ball to a pole, but it was fun — for him and for us — to unwind him until he wrapped himself around again.

He was happy, well-loved and well-fed and seemed to grow accustomed to the ritual, often waiting for someone to tie him, as if he, too, didn’t trust himself not to run into I-71’s siren song.

I’ve been thinking about Baby Walter — who must be 40 by now — all day.

This morning, before sunrise, before anyone else in our house was awake, when the temperature hovered at -16 degrees, my 83-year-old mother crept outside with her walker — wearing only a t-shirt, tennis shoes and a coat — and smoked a cigarette.

She made it back to the couch safely and we only discovered her crime when my father, who has cancer, went out for his first cigarette of the day and found an overturned coffee cup and a half pack of red Pall Malls scattered on the snow.

It frightened me, but it enraged me just as much.

How long does it take a 104-pound woman to freeze to death if she falls in the snow when its 16-below? Or how about our dog or two cats that always hover around the front door?

My mother has a combination of Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia (caused by smoking). She also has spinal stenosis and scoliosis that leaves her bent at a 50-degree angle, unable to straighten, unsteady on her feet and challenged to hobble on a walker more than a dozen feet without sitting down.

Her physical frailty has in some ways made her mental frailty easier to deal with. I can almost always catch her before she runs amok. But it’s done nothing to temper her bullheadedness or nicotine craving (yes, I’ve tried and failed to convert her to patches and gum and e-cigarettes).

From the first week mom and dad moved in, there has been a single rule that has dominated our lives: Mom must never go outside — or even open the door — unless someone is at her side.

Her dementia has stolen much of her left brain, always her weakest side. She doesn’t know $5,000 from $5. But even now she knows the door rule and knowingly broke it for a cigarette.

Nursing home was my first thought. I’m nearing the end of my caregiver rope.

Standing by my dad as he negotiates cancer — an oncologist today decided to end his radiation a week early so he can go on chemo because the tumors in his lungs are leaving him short of breath — is exhausting. And it’s sad.

Lassoing my mother’s wants and needs at the same time is nearly impossible.

But here’s the thing: My dad’s final chapter is closing.

And even though my mom isn’t the woman she was — and both OG mom and dementia mom make dad bats — I know he’d rather have her close as he fades away.

So I’ve got myself a Baby Walter dilemma: How do you prevent someone you love from running into traffic and getting killed?

I have a tree, but I’m unwilling to use a tether.

Please remember: © Amanda Garrett and Mom and Dad Move In — from 2015 until present: Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this written material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Amanda Garrett and Mom and Dad Move In with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Feel free to re-blog on WordPress.

Update: Nursing home transport aides who not only drive residents to medical appointments, but handle their insurance and questions once they get there

Earlier this week, I wrote about the best nursing home in our county — and one of the best in Greater Cleveland — using its transportation aides to not only drive residents to doctors’ appointments, but to manage the residents’  insurance and medical questions once they get there.

Today, I saw this in action. The same nursing home resident I wrote about this week was back in the waiting room of the oncology center. She is having radiation to her brain and already, during her first week, has developed a bright red, raw-looking splotch on her temple.

A different transportation aide from the nursing home — it only has two — was with the woman today. He disappeared and came back a few minutes later, saying he had spoken with the oncology nurses, trying of figure out where he could buy a cream the resident was supposed to have to soothe the burned skin.

The pharmacy at the nursing home where the woman lived didn’t have it, the driver said. So the oncology nurses in radiation gave him some samples of the cream for the woman until he could track down a tub, he said. But he didn’t know where to go.

I bought the same cream for my father a few days before, so I shared the name of the drug store with the driver and the woman. The driver dutifully jotted down the information on his clipboard and both he and the nursing home resident seemed pleased there was a solution.

But again, I ask: Why are nursing home drivers tasked with medical duties? This is bizarre.

This driver was every bit as helpful and respectful to the nursing home resident as the other nursing home driver I met with her this week. When dad was through with his radiation today and I drove up and parked at the entrance to run in and get him, the nursing home driver even wheeled dad outside and helped me get him into the car.

But what kind of nursing home care system do we have when drivers are handing the needs of a radiation patient?

Would you let a nursing home kitchen assistant negotiate medical care for your mom and dad? Some are.

When my dad and I were waiting for his daily cancer radiation treatment yesterday, a gangly, good-natured kid wheeled a woman into the room and parked next to us.

He was in his early 20s and could have passed for the woman’s grandson the way he doted on her, tucking a hand-crocheted blanket around her shoulders, making sure she had enough water to drink because a medical condition dried out her mouth.

But he was an employee at the nursing home where the woman lived — the highest-rated facility in our county and one of the best in all of Greater Cleveland. Hopeful residents each fork over about $5,000 to get on the facility’s waiting list and often spend years elsewhere before a space opens in independent, assisted-living, nursing or memory care units.

After a nurse wheeled the woman away for radiation, the young man told us he started working in the nursing home’s kitchen in 2009. A few months ago, one of the nursing home’s two transportation jobs opened up and he landed it.

He figured it would be a simple job, driving the residents — about 300 — to places they needed to go. But it has turned out to be much more complicated.

All of residents have lots of medical appointments and besides the transport obstacles — safely getting people on walkers, canes and in wheelchairs into and out of offices through ice and snow — most need help handling their insurance and medical questions and answers with doctors and nurses.

What? My face froze.

So you not only drive them, you act as their representative at doctors’ appointments, I asked, just to make sure I understood.

Yes, he said, shaking his head. It’s a shame, he said, how so many families absolve themselves of all responsibilities once a loved one is ensconced at a nursing facility.

A few minutes later, dad and I were sitting in another room with his oncologist. Dad told her he had started having pain in his esophagus near where his tumor is. She said she would write a prescription for a soothing serum to coat his throat that contained Benadryl as one of its main ingredients.

Wait, I interrupted, dad already takes one Benadryl pill every night before bed to help him sleep. Couldn’t that be a problem?

Yes, she said. Dad should stop taking the nighttime Benadryl because taken together, the serum and the Benadryl, could cause him to fall.

A fall — even though dad’s cancer is at Stage 3 and only being treated palliatively — is more likely to kill dad than his cancer, another oncologist told us after dad asked him how he would likely die (the other most likely way is aspiration).

So this seemingly simply Benadryl mix-up couple have been an early death sentence.

Would the good-natured nursing home transport driver have caught this potential medical mistake if he took dad to this radiation appointment? Doubtful.

I’m a veteran newspaper reporter — trained in both reporting facts and asking tough questions — and I have a difficult time managing medical care for my parents, two people I love.

How would a kitchen assistant turned driver manage this for strangers? And why should anyone expect him to?

No matter how good his intentions are — and they seemed exceedingly good — the nursing home driver has no medical training and far too many residents to know each of their medical needs and vulnerabilities.

Later, on our drive home, I asked dad if he was surprised how that nursing home depended on its drivers. No, he said, but he thought it sad, especially considering how much people pay for their care.

The nursing home driver told us the woman he brought to radiation that day shells out more than $8,000 a month. More skilled nursing care or the memory unit — a separate, locked-down facility for dementia patients — costs residents much more, he said.

What do residents get for that money? Some were on a field trip to nearby Harry London Chocolates that day to see how bon bond and chocolate-covered pretzels are made. Tonight, a group of residents is putting on a stage show open to the public.

And one day a week — the day many residents live for — the lobby is filled with therapy dogs who wag and lick away loneliness and fear.

All of that is fantastic. It’s also a clean, well-run facility where many residents feel a kinship with staff. I know. My aunt was a resident and I’ve been a visitor.

Yet none of this makes up for a kitchen assistant being promoted to a driver whose job also includes negotiating residents’ off-site medical care.

Caregiver gripe of day: Other caregivers, delivery drivers and morons hogging drop-off zone

The suburban medical building where I take my father for daily radiation treatments needs a traffic cop.

Drivers are selfishly and needlessly clogging the large semi-circle drop-off zone.

Today’s traffic included: A white delivery van parked with its flashers on for at least 20 minutes; An old man in a mini-van with a Veterans license plate parked, engine off, waiting for his wife; And a couple of SUVs idling for reasons unknown.

Not today, but often, there’s any number of small buses from area assisted living facilities jockeying for positions there, too.

This isn’t a design problem.

This is a user problem.

Drivers: It Is common sense and common courtesy to park elsewhere until the person you’re picking up is ready to go.

It’s simple. The person you’re picking up (or his doctor’s office) should call you when they’re approaching the entrance. Don’t park at the entrance and wait.

It’s bad enough I have to cart my dad’s wheelchair to this place because there’s no guarantee a wheel chair will be available.

But please, fellow drivers, give a gal a break: Leave room at the entrance for me park, pop my hatch, wrestle out the wheelchair and get dad safely inside.

I always do the same for you.

Caregiver gripe of the day: Doctors who scribble prescriptions for drugs patients need the same day

Today dad received his first of 20 daily radiation treatments.

But before the technologist even wheeled him back to the giant machine, she handed me a prescription an oncologist had written for an anti-nausea medicine dad is supposed to take 30 minutes before each appointment.

Two questions:

A) Why wasn’t this prescription provided earlier so dad could have taken the pill before his first treatment?

B) Why didn’t the doctor phone/fax/email the pharmacy so I wouldn’t have to stop twice — once to drop off the prescription and once to pick it up?

Doctors: Patients who don’t feel well and family caregivers — who often are juggling so many responsibilities that one more seemingly simple task could break them — need your help streamlining every aspect of medical care, including prescriptions.

There is no reason to write a prescription and hand it to a patient. Doctors should make sure their staffs submit prescriptions to the pharmacies of their patients’ choice for easy pick up.

This especially holds true for doctors prescribing medications to hospital patients in the hours before a patient’s  release. Trying to get a hospital patient home comfortably is difficult enough without having to stop at a pharmacy on the way. Or perhaps even worse, a caregiver must abandon the patient at home alone while he runs back to the pharmacy and waits on the medication.

In my case, dad is already weak from his cancer. And after today’s radiation, he is especially wobbly. Yet I left the poor guy in the car — not yet warmed up, when it was 18 degrees outside — while I dropped off the prescription.

Why? I — like so many other caregivers — have few choices.

I’m straddling caring for my mom, who has dementia, and my dad, who has cancer and other health issues. But others are juggling kids and jobs and the needs of others’ too.

So now, as I type this, my dad is sleeping in his recliner and my mom is planted on the couch nearby. I’m running out to pick up the prescription, hoping that nothing goes wrong while I’m gone.

This all could have been avoided if the oncologist would have submitted the prescription to the pharmacy herself — and maybe even done so a few days before it was needed.

Queen for a day: Some don’t need a crown

When I was in grade school, my Aunt Betty would whisk me away every year on my birthday, taking me wherever I wanted to go, buying me whatever I wanted to have.

It sounds extravagant, but it wasn’t.

The world I knew then was tiny and so were my desires.

The birthday journey usually began with me steering my aunt’s brown hulk of an Oldsmobile — my Uncle Earl’s Shriners figurine securely attached to the dashboard, its fez wobbling back and forth — out of our long driveway while Aunt Betty worked the gas and brakes.

From there, we’d head to the mall in her blue-collar town and eat ice cream for lunch and hunt treasures my parents couldn’t or wouldn’t buy me: White go-go boots in second grade; a Barbie-like doll that grew an inch and sprung breasts when you turned her left arm backward; bellbottom blue jeans with wild tapestry fabric in the flare that only showed when I walked; Pong.

Afterward, my parents would pick me up, stuffed and exhausted, from Aunt Betty and Uncle Earl’s house, a single-wide, aqua-color trailer with a white plastic poodle chained to one side, a black plastic poodle chained to the other.

I have never felt more like a queen — or more loved — than on those days.

Thirty-five years later, long after my aunt and uncle had died, I tried to recreate that kind of experience for my mom, taking her and her wheelchair on mini-adventures, things she once loved to do.

We rubbed noses with goats and dug our fingers so deeply into sheep’s wool that our hands were covered with lanolin. We revisited her haunts at Kent State University and stopped for mugs of beer. And during the coldest parts of winter, we reveled in the humid warmth of greenhouses, trying to absorb new life from the plants growing all around us.

All of it was fun. But nothing made mom’s heart soar until last Christmas.

It started with failed shopping trips. Mom wanted what she called an “old lady sweater,” the kind her own mother wore.

I knew what she meant: A thick, acrylic cardigan — probably pink, baby blue or ivory — with buttons the size of silver dollars that were covered by the same knit the sweater was made out of. Every farmer’s wife at our Methodist church had one draped around her shoulders most Sundays when I was growing up.

But I had no clue where to buy one in the 21st century.

We tried Macy’s and Dillard’s and JCPenney. At Kohl’s, I showed her now fewer than 30 sweaters. All rejected.

Tired but determined, she told me to take her to Goodwill.

Mom has always been a scavenger.

Decades before it had a name, she pioneered shabby chic. I remember her hauling home somebody’s used dining room table and beating it with chains before white-washing the scarred-up surface to give the table a worn look.

And when I cleaned out her closet a few years ago, I discovered a vast collection of blazers — more than 70 —  almost all thrift store finds.

From the moment I wheeled her through the doors of Goodwill, it was clear: Mom was ascended her lost throne.

There were no prices to consider, no technology-inspired designs, nothing that felt unfamiliar.

When I parked her and her chair between racks of sweaters, she methodically began pawing through each hanger,

I spied the prize before she reached it — a pink cotton-candy knit — but I didn’t say anything.

When mom reached the sweater, she rubbed the hem between her fingers and smiled.

This, she triumphantly declared, was it.

It was like witnessing Cinderella’s prince charming finding the match to the glass slipper — magic.

When we got home, I threw the sweater into the wash and she has worn it every day since. I’ve scrubbed out soup and coffee and gravy stains and that ancient $3 sweater still looks like new.

Last week was mom’s 83rd birthday and I offered to whisk her away, taking her wherever she wanted to go, buying her whatever she wanted to have.

Her world is tiny now, and so are her desires.

On Sunday, we returned to Goodwill where mom — poring through the stacks of dog-eared books and discarded handbags — reigned like a queen and, I hope, felt loved.

Life, as George Carlin used to say, is a series of dogs…

My husband is at the veterinarian’s office with my parents to euthanize their elderly dog, Missy.

Missy has full-blown doggy dementia — yes, that’s a thing (I wrote about it last month on this blog).

We likely would have tried to care for Missy a few more weeks, but my dad decided it was time.

He begins palliative radiation treatments for esophageal cancer Tuesday and, in many ways, I’m thankful Missy will be gone so we can concentrate on dad’s care.

But this is the first time my parents haven’t had at least one dog of their own since they married nearly 60 years ago.

It’s also the first time they haven’t lived in their own house, haven’t handled their own medical appointments and haven’t paid their own bills.

It’s an awkward, painful and unnerving time straddling the end of this life and whatever comes next.

I watch from a distance and wait to be infused with new wisdom I can carry with me from my 40s into old age. But none ever comes.

So as I pack up Missy’s food and water bowls for the SPCA, I pet my own mutt and wonder how many more dogs my husband and I have left.

Have you checked your parents’ pills? Even if your folks are independent, they may need you to be their daily pharmacist

About a month before I abruptly left The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer to take care of my parents, I was sitting in a cramped public housing apartment reporting on an old man who nearly died after mixing up his medication.

Every time the man re-filled a prescription, he dumped the pills into a tall clay jar on his kitchen counter that was full of all his other medications. A couple of times a day, the man poured out a palm-full of the white, pink and red pills and popped them into his mouth, figuring the random assortment was good enough to keep him alive.

What a moron, I remember thinking smugly at the time.

I dreaded that assignment. It was part of the newspaper’s annual tradition spotlighting nonprofit organizations worthy of readers’ donations at Christmastime. Every reporter had to do a feel-good story and this was mine. A home-care agency ultimately sorted out the man’s medication and he was, not surprisingly, healthier and happier.

Little did I know, however, my own mother was keeping a sort of pill jar of her own.

She and dad were living independently at their home, but it was clear they were having problems. Dad, who never even made his own sandwiches, was now cooking all their meals.

There were cigarette burn marks on the kitchen table and on the floor.

And mom had started to fall — a lot. On the January day I found her tangled in a quilt rack unable to get up, I had enough.

A couple of months earlier, I had forced mom and dad to accept a daily visit from a home-healthcare agency. But clearly, they needed more help. It was time for them to move in with us or into an assisted living/nursing home. They chose us.

I suspected, but hadn’t fully realized how much trouble mom was having with her medications until I started packing them up.

More than a dozen bottles of prescription pills sat on the kitchen counter — including four filled with powerful painkillers that were supposed to dull her chronic back pain. But I also discovered scores more prescriptions. Transparent brown bottles filled two shelves of a kitchen cupboard, a bathroom medicine cabinet and a nightstand.

Most of the bottles were more than half empty. Some were a decade old. There were antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, anti-acids, blood pressure medications and more painkillers.

Dad suspected mom was misusing the pills, but didn’t want to challenge her.

That, as caregiver, was my ugly job.

After consulting her doctors, I started weaning her off all pain medication and other prescriptions that often caused confusion in the elderly — particularly someone my mom’s size (she was less than 90 pounds when she moved in with us).

Then, we added or replaced those drugs when needed. A smart nurse practitioner recommended, for example, using an anti-seizure medicine for pain. It works better for mom than any of her painkillers — with no side effects.

Mom’s daily falls stopped within weeks. And it’s been more than two years since she’s taken any tumble.

Yet it took a year to sort out all the meds.

And she still relies on me every day, several times a day, to give her the medications she needs.

My dad — who only took a daily aspirin when he moved in with us — now takes nearly a dozen medications, too.

That can be confusing for anyone, especially someone who doesn’t feel well.

Sometimes doctors cancel a medication or add one for a limited time. More often, the pills change shape or size when the pharmacy gets a better deal from a different supplier.

To help myself keep it straight, I maintain separate, evolving lists of medications in computer files for mom and for dad (and printouts of those lists to take to each doctor’s appointment, urgent care visit and hospital admission).

I also keep mom and dad’s medications — prescription and over-the-counter — in separate large plastic containers: Blue for him, pink for her.

Finally, I rely on a series of small snap-top food storage containers, disposable drinking cups and standard days-of-the week medication holders to help me help them get their pills right.

Of course, all this has made me look differently at the old man I was reporting on in public housing. Poor guy. I was the moron who didn’t understand.

I don’t know why his family didn’t intervene. Maybe they didn’t care.

Or maybe they — like myself and so many others with their own family members — didn’t realize he needed help.