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Aging in place

An Aging-in-Place Solution?

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Yesterday, while idling away some time by ogling real estate ads, I stumbled across an amazing factoid: An apartment in the very elegant highrise where three of my friends reside costs, astonishingly, no more than what I could net on sale of my house!

WTF? These are very nice apartments in a very stylish part of town. Friends’ place overlooks the Phoenix Country Club. The lightrail cruises right past on Central, inviting you to ride up to AJ’s (my favorite gourmet chow line) or down to the Heard Museum or the Phoenix Art Museum or the Civic Center or the East Valley.

The place looks spectacularly expensive, and in fact I recall a friend speculating that one couple we know must have spent an arm and a leg to move in there.

Maybe. Maybe not. One ad shows a two-bedroom palace identical in layout to our friends’ place for right about what my house is worth. These are very pleasant apartments with spectacular views in a choice urban locale.

As I gazed at the photos of this dwelling, it occurred to me that the place is larger, brighter, and far more liveable than the two-bedroom apartment my elderly friends retired to at the Beatitudes, a life-care community. And it ain’t costing its occupants $7,000 a month to live there!

Of course, neither does it provide nursing home insurance for two aged adults. But…but… Think about that. If you were to put 7 grand a month aside, in short order you would have more than enough to cover even a fairly lengthy stay in a nursing home.

The average cost for a two-person room in an Arizona nursing home is $171 a day; for a private room, $212. So, hmmmm….. $212 a day comes to a tab of $6572 for ONE month in a nursing home, for ONE person. That’s less than my friends at the life-care community are spending per month — but for two people. In other words, between the two of them, in 60 days they spend enough to put each of them up in a nursing home for a month.

Hm. The average stay in a nursing home is 835 days, we’re told (by a not altogether unbiased source…). That’s  about 27 months. Clearly, a hefty monthly set-aside will cover nothing like the amount of time you’ll be warehoused. That doesn’t include the care you would need at home; apparently many people receive several months of this kind of assistance. Fidelity estimates a couple will spend $245,000 on healthcare ABOVE AND BEYOND nursing care. Holy shit.

On the other hand, these figures are not the only ones out there. A 2009 study showed the median length of stay for those who did not die in the nursing home was 5 months.

The median length of stay was only 5 months (IQR 1-20). The majority of residents had short lengths of stay, 65% of decedents had lengths of stay of less than one year, and over 53% died within 6 months of admission.

At $6572/month for each of my two friends in the old-folkerie, a 27-month stay would cost just ONE of them  $177,444. Meanwhile, to live on the campus in a two-bedroom apartment, in the run-up (we might say) to the nursing-home stay, my friends are presumably paying $3500 apiece: we’re told the tab is 7 grand for the two of them. Each of them is effectively being charged $3500 a month to stay in a tiny two-bedroom apartment until such time as they need the nursing home (IF they need the nursing home).

Okay. $6572 for each person for nursing home care, right? The buy-in at this old-folkerie is $350,000±. If one of them keels over today, that $350,000 would cover 53.3 months of nursing-home care: twice as long as the exaggerated median stay cited by companies who want you to buy nursing-home insurance or buy into a life-care community (i.e., just about enough to cover a median stay for each of them, if you believe those figures). It’s ten times as long as the median stay reported by an unbiased research study. If they both keel over today, their buy-in would cover each of them for about 26 months.

But the buy-in isn’t all. Even after ponying up the entire sale price of their home just to get in the door, they’re still paying $7,000/month in rent on their cramped apartment: $3500 apiece from now until they croak over. And…for each month that they spend that $3,500 apiece, they pony up the cost of almost two months in the nursing home.

Fifty-three months of coverage for the buy-in price alone? Yes. That does add up to ten times the median nursing home stay, as calculated by research that is not dedicated to scaring the bedoodles out of old folks.  But okay, that 7 grand is for two people: only slightly more than the median cost of a month’s nursing home stay, per partner.

Hm.

So, if you were to take your $350,000 and park yourself in 1 Lexington Avenue, deep in the heart of Phoenix’s endlessly gentrifying North Central corridor, in comparison with what you would get for $350,000 at the old-folkerie, you would have…

  • A significantly larger and nicer apartment…
  • …in a vibrant part of the city that is NOT adjacent to the meth-ridden, crime-infested Conduit of Blight Boulevard, as is the case for the old-folkerie in question
  • A concierge parked in the lobby
  • The lightrail within steps of the front door
  • $7,000 a month in your pocket, which would buy a WHOLE lot of in-home care for the two of you, or, should the occasion arise, two months of nursing home care per one month of $7,000 set-aside
  • Entertainment, cultural events, restaurants, and a very fancy grocery store along that light-rail line
  • Freedom from surveillance by hired nannies
  • A private residential environment (albeit in an apartment building), as opposed to an institutional environment

The more I think about this, the more I think…wow! That’s the answer!

The one and only thing gives me pause about moving into one of those places right now: the dog.

I can’t imagine what I would do with Ruby. Schlepping her up and down a tower in an elevator several times a day so she can be marched around until she does her business does not seem even faintly practical. It would be out of the question if I happened to be as sick as I have been over the past three months, what with a case of bronchitis and then a fall that has spavined a hand and a leg. Unless you lived on the ground floor, you simply couldn’t have a dog…and there are no ground-floor apartments in that place.

If I moved in there now — which as a practical matter might be advisable — I’d have to find another home for Ruby. And I don’t wanna.

Ruby is about five years old now. The median life-span for corgis is 12.5 years, though some have been known to go as long as 16 or 18 years. Assuming she’s typical, she should live another seven years. In seven years, I’ll be 82.

That’s not an unreasonable age to move to an old-folkerie. However, this house is costing me significantly more, when you count in details such as property tax and homeowner’s insurance and the cost of the pool and the yard, than one of those apartments would cost, even with the $333/month property tax and the $716/month HOA fees and the $88/month homeowner’s insurance. I think.

But…

It looks a great deal as though the monthly costs there would be much higher than they are here, primarily because the property tax is much higher here and because I pay no HOA fees, exorbitant or otherwise. My homeowner’s insurance is significantly higher, but not THAT much higher.

By way of comparison, if you add the property tax, the HOA fee, and the homeowner’s insurance, you get a base cost per month of $1,137 to live in that place. That, of course, doesn’t include water, electric, and whatever they charge you to park in their garage. If you add up my present property tax, homeowner’s insurance, Gerardo’s bill, and the pool guy’s bill, you get $460 a month. [Of course, that doesn’t include the occasional but inevitable hits like roof repair, air-conditioning and plumbing repair, or the breath-taking water and power bills…but stlll…it’s nigh enough unto apples-to-apples.]

!!!

That’s a far cry from $1137 a month. And from the 7 grand a month we’re told our friends are paying over at the old-folkerie.

What do you get, compared to the Funny Farm, for that $1137/month?

  • Greater security
  • A concierge
  • Proximity to a credible (though not ideal) hospital
  • Public transit right out the front door
  • Cultural attractions, restaurants, and shopping within walking distance
  • Less space to have to take care of
  • A stunning view of the entire East Valley
  • A prestigious address
  • If you like to travel, a place where you can just lock the door and take off whenever you please
  • And probably lots fewer burglaries, cop helicopter fly-overs, and drug-addicted bums

What do you NOT get? Ahhh…there’s the rub! You don’t get…

  • Two Arizona sweets and a Myer lemon that are laden with fruit just now
  • A pool where you can skinny-dip every day of the spring, summer, and fall
  • Goodly distance between you and the closest neighbor
  • Ruby the Corgi
  • A shady neighborhood of million-dollar homes through which to walk the corgi
  • A neighborhood park
  • Young upwardly mobile neighbors moving in with their cute little kids
  • A Sprouts within walking distance (not that one would walk down Conduit of Blight Blvd to get there…but still…)
  • A Walmart Neighborhood Grocery (a bigger asset than we of the snooty upper middle class would like to admit) within a five-minute drive
  • Friendly neighbors in a politically active neighborhood association
  • Cops regularly watching the place from helicopters
  • A garage in which to park your car right outside your kitchen door

So it goes.

Just now, it looks to me like the pro’s of staying in a house that’s much larger than I need, located next to a dangerous meth slum, outweigh the pro’s of moving into a (very nice!) mid-town apartment that’s half the size of the Funny Farm. For less money but at the cost of having to stay alert to what’s going on around me, I get more space, a private pool and yard, great neighbors, and Ruby the Corgi.

 

Stay or Fly: The Busted Paw, the Peeper, and the Doc

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Sooo… After the little jig I did yesterday to deflect the turkey who was transparently casing my house, I had to cancel out of choir. This provided the opportunity to move the 2:00 p.m. appointment at the urgent care unit next door to the neighborhood Albertson’s forward to noon. This turned out to be a good thing for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that I diddled away two hours there. If I’d gone in at two, that caper would have consumed the entire afternoon.

They decided the pained paw probably has no fracture in any of the complicated set of bones that make up a human hand. But nevertheless, they sent the X-rays to a radiologist for assessment, later in the week. So that was mildly reassuring.

So I ended up chatting at length with a PA, these groups’ answer to an MD. What a doll! He fessed up that he was 53 — dayum! Born 20 years too late. He was an Indian gent — India Indian, I mean. Two daughters, wife, nice career. And even warier than I am of Life in the Big American City. I mentioned to him that when I fell I was walking Ruby the Corgi, and in passing remarked that I used to have German shepherds but at my age feel I’m past the time in life that I can effectively handle a large, high-drive dog.

Now get this: the clinic is right on Conduit of Blight, the border between the ‘Hood and a meth-ridden slum. And he says — apparently PC is not a Thing in New Delhi — that given some of the people he’s seen in that practice, he strongly recommended that I get another German shepherd, for my safety. But not just any German shepherd. “Spend the money, raid your life savings, to get a fully trained German shepherd.”

Yipes!

I said, “Well, it’ll have to wait until the corgi passes on, another five to seven years.”

He said, “No, don’t wait. If you have a trained German shepherd (by that, he clearly meant protection training), you will get another ten years of independent living. Otherwise, you won’t be safe and you’ll have to move on before then.”

Holy mackerel!

That was quite the exchange, because…well…we’re talkin’ about a guy who deals all the time, day in and day out, with the denizens of Meth Central. He remarked, too, that social problems in this country have become exponentially worse. And no amount of education or social service seems to be helping. He had, he said, seen young men with master’s degrees in fields like business and science, “melting away” (his phrase) as drug addicts.

Well. However. He is not a guy who deals with German shepherds all the time. In my experience with them (about 20 years’ worth), a good GerShep does not need protection training or any other kind of training other than basic obedience work to do the job for you. This fella, for example, would no doubt prove himself useful in an emergency…

The problem with a Gershep, provided you know what you’re doing and you’re lucky in your choice of companion, is not training but expense. These are very costly dogs to care for throughout a nine- to twelve-year lifetime. They can develop some spectacularly pricey ailments, not the least of them pannus, osteoarthritis, dysplasia of several varieties, thyroid failure…and on and on. So, in retirement the problem is not so much the dog’s strength and need to have you be incontrovertibly Alpha; it’s that you can’t afford the health risks when you’re living on Social Security.

At any rate, such speculation does nothing to address the issue of a sh!thead casing my house, just as we come up on the High Burgling Season that is Christmas gift-exchange time.

The plan: I happen to have an old stereo sitting in the family room. Believe it or not, the thing still works. So the strategy is to turn it to an NPR yakathon, turn up the volume, crack the solid-core door into the garage open, and lock up the dog in the back bedroom. That way, anyone who approaches the front of the house will hear the blabbity-blabbity through the tinfoil garage door. We are told this strategy — leave a radio or TV set on — is pretty effective against prowlers, because they can’t be sure no one is in the house.

Ruby sleeps in her nest under the toilet all the time I’m gone. If I just close the bedroom door, she won’t be able to race outside through the garage and head for Yuma when I come home. The radio will be plainly audible through the garage to anyone who approaches the front of the house, and of course it blats right through the glass doors and windows in back. Its racket doesn’t carry through that solid-core door; hence, I’ll need to crack it open a bit.

HOW, you may ask reasonably, did I instantly size up our passer-by as a would-be burglar?

By his dogs.

His dogs were  behaving as though they wanted to be nowhere near the guy. While he was ogling my house from in front of WonderAccount’s place, they were hunkered on the ground behind him, as far away as they could get at the end of their leashes.

That is not normal doggy-walk behavior. Dogs do not huddle behind you when you take them on a doggy-walk. They drag you down the street.

Plus…after innumerable daily doggywalks of my own, I know all the dogs in our neighborhood. His are not among them. By extension, I know most of the neighbors by sight…never saw this dude before.

The dogs’ strange behavior drew attention to the guy’s strange behavior. And the guy’s strange behavior was…strange.

But THEN…heh heh heh!

When I pretended to drive out but in fact circumambulated the block and showed up back in the driveway about 40 seconds later and found him ACROSS THE STREET AND LURKING NEXT TO MY HOUSE on the east side, where he was studying the front entrance and the front patio, well…he did himself in with that stunt.

Seriously: it could not have taken more than 40 seconds to get back to my driveway. The next street north was empty — nary a soul out in front — so I gave that six-banger a mighty hit of gasoline and JETTED up the road. I would be surprised if it took much more than 30 seconds for me to re-coalesce in front of the Funny Farm. And lo! there he was, upping the ante on the casing job.

German shepherd. Hm. Pit bull, maybe?

One Damnfool Thing after Another

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Ohhh dear Lord…what have I done to piss You off this time?

😮

Okay. Last night I made an appointment at the Urgent Care to get the probably-not-broken (I hope) hand X-rayed at 2 p.m., allowing time for choir and the service and for driving back & forth.

This morning when I awaken, the paw is notably swollen — a new development. Though I manage to bring the swelling down with an ice pack, I figure this is a clue to a fractured knuckle or other bone near thereunto. I’m pissed, but glad I’d made the appointment.

Twenty to 10, I hop in the car and head out to the church…

Well…to the end of the driveway.

There, right across the street, is some guy whom I’ve never seen and who has The Look of a denizen of the far side of Conduit of Blight Blvd (which marks the border of a meth slum). He’s standing there peering around and punching at a cell phone.

Taking notes, are we, buddy?

He can see me leave, and he also can see there’s no other car in the garage.

Last time the neighbors and I called the cops for a prowler, it took them 45 minutes to show up.

So…I drive around the block and circle back. By the time I reach the Funny Farm, our guy has crossed over to my side of the road, gone around the corner, and is now standing next to the east side of my house, punching more data into his cell phone.

After a quick command decision to cut choir and church, I pull into the garage and holler for the dog, loud enough to be heard. Hope the guy hasn’t been watching long enough to know the dog weighs all of 25 pounds, not all of 95 pounds.

Why am I staying here? Is this God asking me that question?

I need to move either to Sun City — a ghetto for old folks — or to Prescott, where it’s probably snowing right now.

Actually, it’s not. Snowing in Prescott, I mean. Just damn cold: 36 degrees. No. I do not want to live in Prescott much more than I want to live in Sun City. But…do I really want to live a half-mile (or less) from a vast swath of dangerous blight?

Ohhh well. Having made the decision to abstain from church, I managed to move the Urgent Care appointment up from 2:00 p.m. to noon, the earliest moment when they have their X-ray equipment working. That rescues the afternoon from chaos, anyway.

I guess.

Walloped

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Friday night (is this really already Sunday?) Ruby & I went for a doggywalk after dark. A neighborhood community party was going on in the park, and, attracted by the happy sounds, I decided we should walk down the road that separates Upper from Lower Richistan and follow it over to the park. It’s quite dark along that stretch. And…in the past five or six years, a developer purchased a piece of horse property which he converted into a small HOA of ugly two-story McMansions, surrounded by an ugly stuccoed wall. Just fit right in to a neighborhood of sprawling single-story 1950s-to-70s ranchers, eh?

Oh well. Aesthetics aside, the builder took as much leave of his senses as he did of his taste. Between this fine wall and the city sidewalk, in a little easement about, oh…maybe six or eight feet wide, he planted several sissou trees.

These fine plants  get HUGE, and they’re extremely aggressive. Their roots will heave every wall and pavement within 40 feet of the trunk.

Not surprisingly, one of these charmers has lifted a whole slab of sidewalk along the way to the park. Since I rarely walk down that way (the park being, alas, a good place to stay away from in the absence of, say, a German shepherd), I’d forgotten about this little eruption. Sooo…trotting along behind a charging corgi, I tripped over it and fell flat on my face!

Wrecked my glasses — that’ll be $200. Wrenched my right hand. And blasted the patella on  the right knee.

Fortunately, I was able to flag down a driver cruising home from his law office. He drove me and the dog back to the house — we were about a half to three-quarters of a mile out.

These small dings hurt like the dickens, especially the hand. I applied ice packs, of which (given my various recent adventures) I have a-plenty residing in the freezer. But though they still hurt, I really do NOT want to spend yet another night in the Mayo’s goddamn ER, not after just barely getting over a two-month bout of bronchitis that I believe I picked up there.

I didn’t think anything was broken. But two days later, the hand is pretty badly swollen, Naturally, it’s Sunday. Made an appointment at the local urgent care joint this afternoon, where I hope they will X-ray it and tell me yea or nay, is a knuckle or metacarpal busted

Lucky thing I only busted my glasses, and not a hip…it was dark as pitch down there, and if I hadn’t been able to get up and step into the roadway to wave my paws and holler, I wouldn’t have had a chance of getting anyone to notice me.

Come to think of it, though, it’s kinda remarkable that a nearly 75-year-old broad could fall flat on her face (twice! this is the second goddamn time — the first was at a dead run) and not break anything., Now that the pain has subsided (presumably under the influence of three ice packs), I doubt if anything is actually broken, except for a chip off a dental crown.

Thankful though I am that no more serious injury was done..HOW could I do without these little interludes? Let me count the ways….

 

Here Comes the Sun…

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Into the third day of a passing storm. It’s supposed to clear tomorrow…today the sun peeked through for several hours, but then the sky clabbered up again and more rain fell with abandon.

Think (hope!) the bronchitis may be starting to clear up. too. In the morning it feels almost like an ordinary cold. But of course, that’s after I’ve been sequestered inside a closed-up bedroom with two hot steamers running for 10 or 12 hours.

In fact, this morning it seemed improved enough to assay a doggy walk. For day after day, poor little Ruby has been trapped in the house by the rain and by the Human’s ailment. Alas, by the time we got to the outskirts of Upper Richistan, the threat of more rain had escalated to a promise. So we had to cut our expedition short and hurry home — just reached the front door when more rain began to pour down.

Thought we’d try again as the weather cleared but then decided I’d druther go back to bed. Plus as I was peering out the front door to check on the downpour status, I spotted a shady pair trotting past the house, transparently stealing and garbage scavenging, almost surely homeless (read “drug addicts” in these parts). On the way home we saw another sketchy fellow going through a garbage bin in the alley behind Josie’s house. In the rain. Uh huh: N.G.

Back at the Funny Farm: yesterday’s extra CPR Call Blocker coding seemed to have had an effect. The number of nuisance calls dropped to two. I thought I’d found the key to blocking nuisance calls from “Name Unavailable,” but another got through. Called CPR’s excellent customer service; the guy there says blocking “Name Unavailable” doesn’t block “Unavailable” calls, each of which has to be separately, manually blocked. Now I’m thinking the only way to deal with this constant harassment is to tell everyone who needs to reach me that the only way to get in touch is by email, and then unplug the phones. Or cancel the service.

As the day passes, the apparent improvement in the epizoõtic backtracks, and by mid-afternoon it again feels like I can’t draw enough air into the lungs to sustain life. So it was back to bed in the confines of the closed bedroom filled with steam.

This is the kind of sh!t that makes you doubt the entire premise of “Aging in Place.” Really? I’m on the far end of being able to drive around the city when I don’t feel well. What is gonna happen when I’m 80 and I come down with this kind of crud? Or something worse? How will I get food? How will I care for myself? Will I die on the floor with no one to notice till my skeleton has been cleaned by the ants?

I see My Beloved Employer, the Great Desert University, whose administrators are always on the lookout for a way to generate another million bucks, are building an old-folkerie for self-styled intellectuals, to house the aged on the campus. Lots of stuff to do. And you even get to go to classes on the campus!

Whoop de doo.

Well, so let’s look at that with the least jaundiced eye we can manage.

Okay. In theory it looks like a good idea. A lot of stuff is going on at the campus. You would be surrounded by young adults, and if you were ambitious enough and influential enough, you might even be able to engineer some activities that would allow you to interact with the critters. Usually a healthy enterprise, this.

However…truth to tell, Tempe is Chez Pitz. Despite the presence of the university, it’s a bedroom community that doesn’t even faintly appeal to me as a place to live. “Old” is the New N*, particularly among the Millennial set: your chance of engaging with the (mostly commuter) students on the Great Desert University campus is almost nil.

Lovely Tempe

However-ever, one would be to some degree — nay, to a large degree — insulated from the overall Southern California-style ticky-tacky of the East Valley suburban lifestyle.

But.

Yes. But. You would be housed in a multi-story apartment building: a rabbit warren.  No yard. No privacy to speak of. No distance between you and your fellow inmates. And not just any apartment building, but a storage bin for old folks.

What would I do with my little dog in a place like that?

Well. You know exactly what I would have to do with my little dog: find some other home for her. And I would never be able to get a dog again.

Sorry. but a goldfish a substitute for a dog does not make. Life is not life without the companionship of a dog. That is fact.

Thus, quite possibly, a life proctored by protectors who will be there to call 911 if you fall and you can’t get up may not be a life at all.

Tomorrow the weather in lovely uptown Phoenix is expected to be “sunny along with a few clouds.” Let’s hope that’s true. And let’s hope it applies to Life, the Universe, and All That…