American Greetings/Hallmark: Cards for nearly everyone and everything — even dogs and divorces — but not for the old

My mom’s cousin, Dorothy, turns 84 this month and I can’t find a birthday card.

Dorothy, like my mom, grew up poor.

(How poor? Dorothy likes to tell a story about coffee grounds: Her mom used them once for a fresh pot, then a second time for a not-so-fresh pot. Afterward, she carefully packed up the grounds and gave them to my grandmother, who squeezed out whatever caffeine was left for a third pot, thankful that her family had coffee at all.)

But like so many of that generation, Dorothy climbed into the middle class, working a good-paying factory job, marrying a man who did the same and frugally saving until they could buy a tidy ranch in a rural swath of Northeast Ohio where they lived for 50 years.

Life was good until last summer when Dorothy fell over picking strawberries in her garden and bonked her head on a stone.

She ended up in the hospital and shortly after, her husband, Lou, fell and broke his ankle.

Dorothy is home now, isolated, unable to drive because her fickle heart sometimes frolics causing her to faint. And Lou is in a nursing home 12 miles away, confused and calling daily, begging her to pick him up, unsure what he’s done to be sent away from his wife and the home he loves.

Happy Birthday? That, to me, implies Dorothy’s past year was swell and her next year — if there is a next year — will be better.

Nevertheless, a birthday card is necessary. If mom doesn’t send one, it’s more than a slight. It’s an invisible white flag conceding life has ended for both mom and Dorothy even though each continues to breathe.

So, as a pharmacist bagged up 28 prescription refills for mom and dad yesterday, I pawed through racks of birthday cards.

I first gravitated toward a slew of funny, acerbic old lady cards that mom and Dorothy would have happily picked for one another just a decade ago. But jokes about diapers or forgetting your name aren’t funny when they’re true.

Next I discovered a whole birthday genre dedicated to: “We’re both so busy, I never tell you how special you are.” Inappropriate when life turns into a series of medical appointments with naps and tv in between.

The rest were a hodge-podge encouraging the birthday girl to party, to swill wine until drunk or to do something special or naughty just for herself. No. No. And double no.

At least 80 cards into my card safari, I abandoned the hunt. I paid the pharmacy clerk $500-plus for drugs extending my own parents’ not-so-pleasant lives and hauled my mini-drugstore home, hundreds of pills in bottles rattling like tiny, sad maracas.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had this card problem. Since my parents moved in, I have been their personal shopper for all cards and gifts they give to each other and anyone else (including me).

Anniversary, Christmas, Sweetest Day (an Ohio tradition concocted generations ago by a clever local chocolatier): Each holiday is filled with land mines and chasms of time that neither candy nor warm bathrobes can cross.

Even buying cards for them is impossible. Most cards grown children give their parents involve “thanks”– thank you for all that you do, thank you for supporting me, thank you for bringing joy to our lives.

I’ve given scores of these sorts of thank-you cards to mom and dad over the years. And I thank them now for being the parents they have been. But the sad truth is, they should be giving me and my husband these thank-you cards now.

And that’s impossible because I would have to buy them. And I wouldn’t, fearing that such a move would trigger a weird psychological echo chamber, maybe even a worm hole for unplanned traveling through time.

But picking out sympathy cards is the worst. And I buy a lot of sympathy cards. Being in your 80s — like my parents are — is not unlike being in your 20s. But you’re sending sympathy cards and attending funerals instead of buying shower gifts and toasting with bad wedding champagne.

Of course it’s sad when anyone loses someone they love. But what is the appropriate sentiment when someone’s body dies years after their brain withered, leaving them a shell? Or when a person, who has longed for the Grim Reaper’s visit, dies after years of suffering, pain and loneliness?

Those passings, I always think to myself, should be celebrated (even if bittersweet).

Unlike so many birthdays, which now seem better off mourned.

Poor Dorothy.

I don’t know what we’re going to drop in the mail this year.

Maybe a blank card, scrawled with words of love and an old photo of better times, a snapshot of her and Lou smiling alongside mom and dad, martinis raised in jubilation.

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.

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.

Suicide is painless: Damn you, Hawkeye Pierce!

“Suicide is painless” — I wake up humming — “it brings on many changes.”

“And I can take or leave it as I please.”

Cue helicopters.

No worries. I’m not offing myself. I’d have a much angrier theme song if suicide was my plan.

It’s just that song, that horrible TV theme song, is nibbling at my brain, sucking out my soul.

I’ve  been trapped in a 1970s, olive-drab time warp for weeks after Netflix released five years worth of M*A*S*H episodes.

Every night after dinner, my parents tune into Hawkeye, Hot Lips and Frank Burns (well, now Charles Winchester III).

And I’m suddenly thrust into this bizarro world where I’m doing dishes and waiting, hoping for them to go to bed….while my mom and dad are eating Oreos and giggling at the TV.

When M*A*S*H first aired, I was 6-years-old and the roles were most assuredly reversed. I prefer the role of couch-dweller.

Caregiving — a term I despise for myriad reasons, but have no word yet to put in its place — is slowly ruining swaths of pop culture and other joys for me.

When mom and dad first moved in, mom would often fall when she got out of bed. I had to come up with something to alert me before her feet touched the ground so I could help her.

There are a lot of devices on the market, but almost all depend on weight. They don’t sound an alert until the person is standing.

My solution? A driveway alarm that sounds if something (presumably a car) breaks a beam.

My husband mounted the part of the device that shoots the beam on mom’s bedside table. And every time mom swung her feet across the beam, the alarm — which I programmed to play my favorite song at the time, Rickie Lee Jones’ “The Moon is Made of Gold” — would play from a device on my bedside table.

“Don’t feel bad because the sun went down, the night has wealth untold,” Rickie Lee crooned, gently waking me for the first time each night mom was getting up.

“You just keep watching, and you soon will see,” Rickie Lee poked me awake the second time mom stirred.

“The moon is made of gold,” Rickie Lee’s chorus only arrived on my third wake-up of the night, usually drawing an exhausted single-word response from me: “Bullshit!”

This continued for months.

And now, I’m probably the only person in the world who gets visibly angry when she hears happy-go-lucky Rickie Lee Jones sing anything.

I’ve since learned to be careful mixing my favorites with anything caregiver related.

Can’t go to flea markets or antique shops because they all seem to have the same musty odor, however, faint, as my parents’ house when we cleaned it out.

Can’t stand the smell of gravy, a standard in dinners I cook for mom and dad. It makes me nauseous. My husband and I have gone vegan.

Can’t love my own, lovely front stoop — carefully painted and planted to be inviting — as my parents have seized it with outdoor furniture as smoking central.

Luckily, M*A*S*H was never a favorite.

I was a little nostalgic when mom and dad first started binge watching, but any sentimentality  evaporated by Season 3.

Now, pity Alan Alda should our paths ever cross.

One of these days, Hawkeye. Pow! Right to the moon.

I know it’s not made of gold.

Finally, first generation of simple technology for the old (and everyone else): Amazon’s echo

Our Amazon echo arrived today — the voice-activated Wi-Fi personal assistant that can tell you everything from whether it’s going to snow tomorrow (in your area or anywhere else) to what you can swap out for baking soda in a recipe.

I’ve only had it connected to for a couple of hours and what’s surprised me most is my father’s immediate embrace of this oh-so-foreign gizmo.

As I was serving my parents dinner, I demonstrated with some simple commands and then let Alexa — the trigger word to turn the device on — slumber.

While I was in the kitchen, I heard my dad: “Alexa, play Dave Brubeck please…..louder….louder…louder…that’s good.”

My dad has always loved computers. But macular degeneration and Microsoft’s switch to an app-like desktop system–so radically different from anything he’s known–was finally too much. He stopped using the computer a month or two ago.

But echo puts him back in the game. And that’s fantastic. I’m truly thrilled about this.

And I don’t think echo’s likability would be limited to those seniors who like computers. If they can remember “Alexa,” almost anything is possible.

I’d suggest to Amazon that, if possible, users should be able to choose their own trigger word. Only “Alexa” and “Amazon” work now. Older folks would likely have a much easier time adjusting to a word or name they are familiar with.

I’ll update this as the days and weeks pass.

But I’m already bummed we don’t have two or three echoes — one for my folks, one for the kitchen and one for our bedroom.

FYI: echo is $99 for Amazon Prime members, $199 for everyone else.

I

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.

I told my dad today he has cancer. Why me? Because the doc who found it apparently didn’t think my father was worth his time

Dad has a tumor on his esophagus that is almost certainly cancer.

Esophageal cancer killed my dad’s father at age 91. It killed my mom’s mother at age 83, which is how old my dad is now.

This cancer, my family knows, is an ugly way to die.

Yet the doctor who discovered the tumor didn’t talk to my dad about it, didn’t look him in the eye and answer his questions.

The doctor instead foisted that burden on me — by phone.

Before I started writing this blog about my outrage, I spoke with four R.N.s — three who work in different departments at the hospital where my dad is, plus an oncology nurse at another facility. I told each how my dad’s diagnosis unfolded today because I wanted to make sure my anger is justified, not just fueled by my fear and grief over the cancer.

Each assured me that my ire was righteous. Three called the doctor’s behavior unprofessional. I call it cold.

Judge for yourself. Here’s what happened:

I wheeled mom into dad’s hospital room just after 2 p.m. He had just returned from having an endoscopy, a procedure in which a doctor inserts a flexible tube with a light and camera attached to scope the digestive track.

This test, we hoped, would reveal the source of dad’s acute blood loss  — which had become so severe the test was pushed back a couple of hours so dad could receive a blood transfusion.

I told the nurse helping my dad I wanted to be there when the doctor came to the room with the results and asked her to get an approximate time because I had to run my mother one-floor up for a scheduled iron infusion at 2:45 p.m. and didn’t want to miss him.

The nurse, who was very helpful, hadn’t been able to reach the doctor by 2:40 p.m., so I scurried upstairs with mom and then rushed back downstairs to wait with dad.

When the nurse saw me, she assured me she was still trying track down the doctor. A few minutes later, the phone in dad’s room rang and the nurse bolted in saying it was the doctor on the line.

The doctor — whom I have never met, but who is part of the gastro practice that both my mother and father use — never asked to speak with my father, nor did he offer an explanation about why he didn’t stop to see us before leaving the hospital.

He instead told me he discovered a tumor that was almost certainly cancerous on my dad’s esophagus. The doctor didn’t have the results of the biopsies yet, but he already called in two oncologists to consult.

I was stunned. I figured a phone call was good news, or at least neutral news — maybe he wanted to run more tests. But not this. A doctor doesn’t drop the cancer bomb by phone.

So I slipped into my most comfortable suit of emotional armor — my newspaper reporter facade — and grabbed a nub of broken pencil from my dad’s bed tray and started asking questions.

The doctor spelled the names of the oncologists for me and told me what would likely happen next — a CAT scan, the assigning a “stage” to the cancer and a treatment plan.

All of this, of course, is happening at the bedside of my dad, who is listening to my side of the conversation and trying to figure out what was going on.

Was this the source of dad’s blood loss, I asked, trying not to say the word cancer until I could talk to dad.

The tumor he found was covered in dried blood, but wasn’t actively bleeding, the doctor said.

Tumors, he told me, bleed intermittently.

The phone call lasted less than three minutes.

When I hung up, I told dad he had cancer.

Dad asked a couple of questions that I had no answers for.

A few minutes later, I picked up mom from her iron infusion on the floor above and told her dad has cancer.

She, too, had questions I had no answers for.

Is this the way medicine is supposed to work?

P.S. I haven’t yet decided whether to post the doctor’s name. I most certainly will write letters to his medical partners and the president of the hospital where this happened. We are not using the oncologists this doctor brought in for consultation.

Inspiration for all of us: At 102, after losing her independence, Judge Jean Murrell Capers found her purpose again — on the radio

I usually sneer at news stories featuring exceptionally beautiful, feisty, healthy seniors citizens because they set an impossibly high standard for most to follow — like willowy super models with large breasts or brainy athletes who earn academic scholarships only to turn pro and haul in a sports fortune.

But here I surrender: I’m finally embracing a local columnist’s love for 102-year-old Jean Murrell Capers, a retired Cleveland Municipal Judge who has led — and continues to lead — an extraordinary life.

I’ve never met the judge, an honorary title she still retains. But I’ve come to know her through more than a dozen columns penned by Plain Dealer writer Phillip Morris. Over the years, he has described her as mother figure, mentor, sage, historian, civil rights leader, pioneer and a fearless Wonder Woman of sorts.

And to be sure, she is all of that. Among other things, Capers:

— sipped tea at the White House with her hero Mary McCloud Bethune and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (also meeting President FDR)

–became, in 1949, the first black woman elected to the city council of any major U.S. city (Cleveland)

–served as an assistant state attorney general in the 1960s and a Cleveland municipal judge in the 1970s and 1980s

— drove herself to Texas and back when she was 95

–specialized in eldercare law until a few years ago, once telling Cleveland Magazine, “The elderly are still believing 98 percent of what they’re told, and 96 percent of what they are told is not true.”

But here’s where her life offers a real-life lesson for those of us who haven’t been so extraordinary.

Two years ago, Morris wrote a frank, honest column about the judge’s failings: She was deeply depressed after being stripped of her driver’s license and forced by a court to move from her apartment into Judson Manor Retirement Community.

Today, Morris followed up with the judge and revealed that she somehow overcame that and reached deep inside — beyond the sadness and anger of losing her independence —  and again found that brightly burning spark that has always propelled her.

Judge Jean Murrell Capers — at 102, a little wobbly, even with her walker — has remade her life.

She’s still at the retirement community. She still can’t drive. But she’s perhaps the the oldest person in the world to co-host a weekly radio talk show.

Her on-air partner, Art McKoy is the Jack Klugman to her Felix Unger.

As precise, thoughtful and focused as the judge is, McKoy — a community activist who for years has often drawn eye rolls (and sometimes ire) from local journalists, police and politicians — is blunt, often abrasive and inexact.

Yet the judge credits McKoy for helping her re-find a purpose.

Every Sunday, from 5-7 p.m., the two talk on air about aging, public service, relationships and families on WERE 1490.

At a recent surprise party to celebrate her 102nd, Morris reported that the judge conceded she is fading.

“But then,” Morris wrote, “without a trace of false modesty, (the judge offered) this rejoinder to the inevitable ravages of age: ‘I’m the best. And when you’re the best, you don’t make excuses for anything.’ ”

That’s something to be celebrated.

If you want to read more about the judge, a link to Phillip Morris’s most recent column follows. From there, you can find his previous writings about her and what an extraordinary woman she was — and still is.

http://www.cleveland.com/morris/index.ssf/2015/01/jean_murrell_capers_continues.html

It’s been a deadly week for senior citizens in Northeast Ohio: Are we, as a nation, doing something wrong?

The bad news here started before daybreak Monday.

A snow plow driver found a 94-year-old woman dead from hypothermia outside an assisted living facility in the Cleveland suburbs.

A few hours later, a 78-year-old man hit the gas instead of the brake on his SUV and plowed through the front of strip mall diner, hitting two women inside, including a 76-year-old who later died.

And a search Wednesday for a couple — ages 88  and 79 — missing from their home in a tiny town ended within 24 hours when a passerby spotted their charred 1986 Pontiac on a dirt road about 30 miles away. Police said the bodies of the man and his wife were burned inside the car, but authorities don’t yet know how they died or who killed them.

The only thing connecting these incidents, other than proximity, is age: Everyone involved is between 76- and 94-years-old.

And it’s made me wonder what we should be doing differently since the U.S. senior citizen population — now more than 43 million people — will nearly double over the next 35 years.

I don’t have those answers, but I have questions:

Why isn’t there a thorough, dependable, free, up-to-the-minute Internet-accessible rating system for all senior citizen living facilities and care agencies? 

Martha Jendrix, 94, died of hypothermia outside of Elmcroft of Sagamore Hills. She had a first-floor apartment in an assisted living section of the facility. Another part of the facility houses residents with dementia.

Police don’t suspect foul play, but they are still investigating how Jendrix ended up outside.

Four years ago, that Elmcroft location faced similar scrutiny after a patient with dementia wandered away from the facility twice, according to Cleveland.com.

The first time, a motorist pulled over, stopped traffic and saved the man who had wandered onto a major highway. Two weeks later, the same man wandered outside, but apparently never left Elmcroft’s campus.

The state ultimately cited Elmcroft for failing to come up with a plan to ensure the dementia resident stay inside.

Since then, Cleveland.com reported state of Ohio inspectors have documented other issues at Elmcroft, including:

–A residential assistant was fired after grabbed a dementia patient by the throat

–Insufficient staffing during night shifts. No one licensed to administer certain medications, oxygen and insulin was on duty even though 42 patients could have needed that help.

–Failing to monitor a 93-year-old hospice care patient with dementia after she fell twice in the same month and fractured her ankle.

Is Elmcroft doing better or worse than similar facilities? Who knows.

Caregivers trying to find a good place for their loved ones could pull state records. But that takes time. And even then, those records can paint an incomplete picture — for good or bad — because what is measured and reported may not be one of the family’s top priorities (like a particularly tender caregiver or an activities director who refuses to give up on a patient).

Online, Elmcroft consistently scores four out of five stars on three Websites where users can rate care centers.

And those ratings, of course, can be skewed because reviewers are anonymous. Anyone from spiteful former employees to the director of a facility trying to boost numbers can post a review and rating.

Should states re-test senior citizen drivers? And, are some seniors less likely to surrender their licenses — even though they know they should — because there are no transportation options available?

As soon as news broke about a senior citizen crashing through a diner, on-line commenters began calling for wholesale re-testing of senior citizens renewing driver’s licenses — or even an all-out ban on drivers over 80-years-old.

In this case, 78-year old Thomas Herrick told police that he (along with his wife and their dog) was pulling his 2014 GMC Yukon Denali into a parking space in front of the diner when he accidentally hit the gas pedal instead of the brake. The SUV smashed through the brick building and plate-glass window where two women in their 70s were eating.

One of those women later died, but her cause of death has not yet been made available.

Was Herrick’s age to blame for this incident? We don’t know.

To renew a driver’s license in Ohio, most seniors only need pass an eye exam. If a senior reports a medical condition, there may be other forms to fill out and driving limitations, but that is usually based on the driver ratting himself/herself out to the state.

The state doesn’t test reflexes or the driver’s ability to turn her neck so she can use all the mirrors to see what’s around. The state doesn’t test for dementia or night vision or scores of other important things that help keep drivers safe on the road.

From my own experience, no senior citizen wants to give up driving. I clearly remember my parents — dressed all in black — sneaking up to my grandparents house in the 1980s and “stealing” my grandfather’s car after my dad noticed how many nicks, dents and scrapes were on it.

My parents took the car because grandpa refused to give up driving — not only because of pride (although that certainly played into it), but because there were places he wanted and needed to go.

Once his car was safely hidden from him in our barn, grandpa agreed that buying a new car at his age — about 86 at the time — was impractical. That was true, but it wasn’t easy. For the next three years — rain or snow — he walked four miles every day he couldn’t find a ride (most days) to see my grandma in a nursing home.

But he also needed to go the grocery, the pharmacy and doctor’s appointments. There was no bus service. No taxi service. No concierge. That burden fell to family, like it does for many today.

Many seniors who can no longer drive can no longer walk either — at least long distances.

If we are going to strengthen the testing for driver’s licenses — and I think we should for all drivers, not just seniors — we need to come up with excellent sources of alternative transportation.

Should there be laws that carry extra penalties for hurting or stealing from senior citizens,? What else can we do to protect the old among us?

Doyle Chumney, 88, and his wife, Lillian, 79, were supposed to drive their son to a nearby airport early Wednesday.

When the couple failed to show up, their daughter went to her parents’ tidy Strasburg — population 2,608 — home and found it ransacked, their car missing.

After the Chumneys’ bodies were discovered Thursday in their burned car in another county, police said they are looking for more than one suspect, but they haven’t speculated on a motive for the crime or whether the Chumneys may have known their attackers.

What a nightmare — for the Chumneys and their family. My sympathies to them.

This crime follows scores of other reports about criminals preying on seniors.

Often its an unscrupulous family member, caregiver, lawyer or financial advisor who drains a senior’s life savings.

I remember the case of David Dadante, a crooked Cleveland broker who destroyed the financial lives of more than 100 investors in a $58 million Ponzi scheme. Some of the retirees impacted said they had to go back to work as Wal-Mart greeters or some other similar job.

Just last year, the duped investors got their money back through a federal civil lawsuit — but it took 8 years. I’m guessing not all the older investors lived long to benefit.

Meanwhile, Dadante — a cocaine user who snorted and gambled much of that money away — is more than half-way through his 13-year prison sentence for fraud. It seems a small price considering the huge destruction he caused in so many lives.

Then there are the violent attacks. Nursing home abuse, domestic violence, rapes, robberies and murders.

The still-unsolved Georgia slayings of Russell Dermond, 88, and his wife Shirley Dermond, 87, sticks in my mind.

In May, after the Dermonds failed to show up for a Kentucky Derby party, friends in their gated community went to check on them and found Russell decapitated in the garage. Shirley’s body wasn’t discovered for weeks. It had been weighted down somewhere in the 30-acre lake behind their million-dollar home.

If police ever solve the case, the killer(s) would likely face the stiffest penalties under existing law since murder is the most serious of criminal offenses.

But why were they targeted and what can we do to protect the most vulnerable among us?

Caregiver juggling: You’re bound to drop something, so try to avoid the chainsaws

Caregiver dropped ball of the day: Overlapping medical appointments

Yah, it’s not the end of the world, but it’s such a pain to rearrange.

When the doctor’s office called today to say my mom’s iron levels were still low and that she needed another round of infusion treatments, I immediately called the hospital to schedule.

The treatments must happen three days in a row and I always try to schedule them around my husband’s days off (which are usually weekdays).

Score! Next Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons were available at the IV infusion lab. I could take my mom for a pre-scheduled podiatrist appointment Monday morning, then head to the hospital for iron in afternoon. The following two days were clear — nothing but iron-ing with mom in the lab.

Then the phone rang. I forgot a longstanding appointment for dad at the same podiatrist’s office on Monday afternoon.

His feet must wait.

Just happy this isn’t a missed appointment with the cardiologist, the pulmonary specialist, the nephrologist or the other life-and-death docs on our do-si-do list of appointments.

(Update 1/20: When I woke up this morning, it hit me: Hospice is scheduled to visit the Monday afternoon of the conflicts, too. A second dropped ball. Sigh. But at least I remembered).

To all the family caregivers who are working outside the home on a schedule someone else sets, I salute you.

I don’t know how you do it.

Haunting moment: What happens when you’re old and alone?

Most of my caregiving life I feel like I’m failing.

My house isn’t clean enough. Meals I cook aren’t tasty enough. And I often wonder whether I push doctors hard enough for answers to my parents’ ailments — or maybe I push too hard.

Yet a chance encounter two weeks ago gave me new confidence that I’m doing OK.

It happened when I was sitting in a doctor’s waiting room with my father,

Most schools were closed that day because temperatures weren’t climbing above 5 degrees. Only two other people were in the waiting room — a frazzled-looking woman in her 50s and a frail, older woman bundled in a coat, scarves and a blanket sitting in a wheelchair.

I assumed they were together, caregiver and parent. But when a nurse called for the woman in the wheelchair to come back, neither woman moved. The nurse called the woman in the wheelchair’s name again and this time, she responded,.

“Someone is going to have to come get me,” she said in a raspy, exasperated voice. “I can’t move myself.”

The nurse in the doorway grimaced, rolled her eyes and sighed while another nurse pushed by to help.

At that moment, and even looking back now, those few seconds seemed to drag out over minutes.

Why didn’t I jump up to help the woman in the wheelchair?

Why didn’t I chastise the rude and unprofessional nurse who rolled her eyes?

Why didn’t I wrap my arms around the woman in the wheelchair and give her a hug of encouragement?

I wish I had done all of those things and I’m still not certain why I didn’t do any.

A few minutes after the wheelchair woman was rolled away, the same snotty nurse called my dad’s name and I shadowed behind him as he slowly inched forward using his chewed-up wooden cane to support the hip joint he has already had replaced twice.

Dad hadn’t visited this doctor, a gastroenterologist, in a couple of years so I gave the nurse a computer printout of my dad’s medication list, along with emergency contacts, names and numbers of his other physicians and his pharmacy information.

I also provided three pages of medical history.

When the doctor came in, he wisely focused on my father, looking at him even when the doctor knew some of the answers — especially the ones involving times and dates — had to come from me, the caregiver.

In the end, we left with appointments for two out-patient medical procedures and a few new prescriptions to pick up.

As I drove home, my dad safely seat-belted next to me, I kept thinking about that woman in the wheelchair.

How did she make it to the doctor? It was very unlikely she could drive and there is no public transport in that suburb.

Who answered questions for her when she met with the doctor? And how would she get prescriptions at the pharmacy?

When dad and I got home, I opened the door from the garage into the kitchen and the winter wind lifted a tiny tumbleweed of pet hair — we have two cats and a dog and my parents have a dog, too — from the hallway baseboard and blew it across my boots onto the white tile floor.

Another failure. But it was small. It didn’t matter as much to me as it would have before seeing the woman in the wheelchair.

I still can’t get her out of my mind.

Today I went grocery shopping and found myself daydreaming about what will happen to my husband and myself when we get old.

We don’t have children — not that having children is any guarantee that they can or will act as caregivers.

And I’m an only child and my husband is the youngest of four, so there will likely be few relations we’ll be able to depend on when the time comes.

I’ll forever regret not helping the woman in the wheelchair that day. But I hope to make it up to her and others who must depend on strangers.

Next month, my dad has a follow-up appointment with the same doctor and I vow to track down that rude nurse and politely explain how difficult it must be for older patients traveling solo.

Pride and dignity are important to everyone and many older patients have likely sacrificed a bit of each just to make it to the doctor’s office. There’s no reason to steal more.

If the nurse is receptive, that’s the end of it. But if she isn’t, I will raise this with her supervisor and the physician.

And in the future, no matter where I am, I won’t hesitate.

Before anyone has time to sigh or roll their eyes, I will jump up to help and to say, without words, you still matter.