Padded Rooms For Seniors

It is tough to grow older for some people. It seems that we all age differently, so some of us will end up in an assisted living facility or a nursing home in our latter years. Falls, dementia, and other health concerns take over our lives so much that we have to have around the clock caregivers.

When my mom agreed to go to an assisted living facility, she still had her mental faculties about her. Physically it was beginning to become a challenge for her to live alone. She had fallen a few times, but luckily she had suffered no broken bones. Macular degeneration had begun to rob her of her central vision so she could not drive anymore or pay her bills.

While she could still function enough to be in an assisted living facility, the rest of the family thought it would be a good idea to place her there. At first it was very tough on her, but as time went by she began to really like it there. She was having a speech problem before she went there to live, but after several weeks of the social activities at the facility, she could talk in complete sentences again. So, being in the assisted living facility had really become a miracle for her and her new outlook on life.

Then one morning she was trying to hurry to the bathroom when she was awaken by the alarm. It seems that she had not been able to figure her new alarm clock out, and it was verbally announcing every hour on the hour and it was keeping her awake at night. So, she put the clock in the bathroom so she could not hear the hourly announcements, but she could still hear the alarm.

I guess every day she would wake up and hurry into the bathroom to shut the alarm off. Then one day she fell on the way to shut off the alarm and she broke her hip. Later she told me that she had figured something out about that talkative clock while she was lying there on the floor. The alarm would shut itself off after ringing for one minute. So, she found out that she never had to hurry to shut it off anymore.

However, she had suffered a broken hip, and she would have to go through the long process of surgery, recovery, and rehabilitation. It was during this time of recovery that one of my granddaughters came up with her thoughts on how the assisted living facility was constructed. The floors of the facility were solid concrete. Most of the residents' homes did not have concrete floors, because most homes are built with wooden floor joists and wooden floors. It seems that wooden floors will give a little when you fall on them. Concrete floors will not give at all.

My granddaughter came up with an idea for longterm care facilities. She said, "Why don't they make padded floors and walls for people like great grandma to live in, so that when they fall they will not break a hip or something? They should not make the walls and floors out of something hard."

She is right. They should make facilities safer for those who need longterm care. Maybe someday my granddaughter will come up with safer ways of building longterm care facilities.