Barb Jestic’s 90-year-old mother was determined to maintain her independence on the farm she had lived on for decades, but her children knew her health was deteriorating fast. The around-the-clock care needed to keep their mother safe was a financial and logistical nightmare, one which highlighted the dearth of resources available to the elderly and their families in rural areas.
In an interview with IW Features, Jestic detailed four years of traveling from Missouri to rural southern Illinois to care for her mother before being forced to place her in a nursing home at the age of 96.
“I would stay with her for two to three weeks at a time, and then another sister would come relieve me for a week or two, and then I’d go back again. So we had the flexibility of having a little bit of help. If I had something I really had to do or desperately wanted to do, then someone else, typically, was able to fill in for me. And my big concern is all of those people out there who have nobody—nobody to help them.”
Even with all the family help, Jestic constantly missed out on her own health-related appointments, as well as on family time with her husband and children in St. Louis.
Making the Jestics’ situation even more complicated is the fact that many resources that might have helped weren’t available because of their mother’s rural location. One such resource, usually available in big cities, was an adult day care for emergency situations where no family member was available. Even hiring a home nurse for a few hours was impossible, as no one was available in the rural town who was willing to administer any kind of medication or cook for the Jestics’ mother due to allergy concerns.
Realistically, Jestic and her siblings could only leave their mother for a couple hours at a time, if that. All the state could offer the family was a caretaker to come and give her mother a bath once every couple weeks.
Jestic said that in their mother’s rural town, there wasn’t even a specific local government agency in charge of helping care for elderly citizens. Even a directory of medical professionals who were available for hire when family needed extra help to care for elderly parents or grandparents would be a step in the right direction, Jestic argued.
The problem of rural elder care is mostly due to a lack of funding, Jestic said. Because populations are lower and sparser in these areas than in urban areas, it is hard to justify the personnel and infrastructure needed to adequately care for rural elderly.
“Funding is difficult to get because they don’t stop to realize they need it because they just say, ‘Well, it’s a small town. There’s not that many people,’” Jestic explained. “And you certainly couldn’t justify having facilities in every town, but if you even had it within driving distance. … I just feel like it’s probably funding as much as anything, and then the rural areas typically get overlooked.”
Indeed, the financial strain of caring for elderly family members adds another layer of unpredictability and stress for families. Under Medicaid, caretakers can often receive pay for hours worked. Yet the paperwork needed to secure this payment was prohibitively burdensome, Jestic said, requiring applicants to detail every single caretaking action they took every single day and send it in every single week.
“In reality, I know people don’t do that. And I can tell you that because we are so busy, especially once they need the 24/7 care, from the minute they get up—after being woken up however many times during the night because she would hallucinate with the dementia, so you’re never getting good sleep. And then everything you have to take care of during the day and all. We’re exhausted by the end of the day. There’s no way that I had the energy to sit down and fill out all this paperwork,” Jestic said.
“You had to document what time you did this, and how many times a day, how much you gave them when you gave them medicines, and what medicines you gave and and all of that kind of stuff,” she explained.
Those who say that Jestic could have just put her mother in a nursing home are missing the point, she said. Plus, nursing homes “aren’t always best for the elderly person either,” she argued. Jestic said she and her family learned this the hard way. When they were finally forced to place their mother in a home, she deteriorated quickly.
“It was a good nursing home compared to many. But that was just the end for her. She absolutely did not want to be there,” Jestic said.
Jestic urges lawmakers to remember rural areas when it comes to funding, and to remember that families deserve options to help their aging relatives live well during their final years.
“Caring for elderly parents in rural areas is no less important than caring for them in the urban areas, except that we do it without the resources,” she said.
