My mother had her left knee replaced in the winter of 2019. When the hospital sent her home, they gave her a walker, a bottle of painkillers, and a thick folder of handouts, which ended up on the kitchen counter under a fruit bowl. Nothing in that folder mentioned the old blue recliner. She’d been sitting in it since the Mulroney years. It was soft and deep, and once she was in it after surgery, getting back out took both of us, a lot of counting, and a fair bit of swearing.
I’ve spent a little over a decade writing about health and home care since then. Mostly I interview nurses, physios, and occupational therapists, plus a lot of tired family members. My sense now is that the clinical side of a mobility problem gets plenty of attention. What gets almost none is how people actually get through an ordinary Tuesday. So here’s what I’ve picked up, roughly in the order the day happens.
First thing in the morning
Denise, a home-care nurse I’ve interviewed more times than she’d probably like, has a rule she drills into every patient. Before standing up, sit on the edge of the bed and count to sixty. When you go from lying down to standing, your blood pressure can drop for a moment. Add blood pressure pills or a bit of overnight dehydration and you’re the one swaying in the hallway at 7 a.m. Counting to sixty feels a bit silly, I know, but it works.
The bathroom is where I’d spend money first. Grab bars should be screwed into the wall studs. I’m still not sure why suction-cup versions exist, because the physios I’ve talked to can’t stand them, and they come off the wall at exactly the moment you lean on them. A shower chair is the other must. My mother called hers “the throne,” said she’d never use it, and then used it every day for four months.
When you get dressed, sit down. A sock aid is a strange plastic gadget with two cords hanging off it, and it costs about what you’d spend on lunch. It looks silly and works very well. Most falls I’ve heard about involve backless slippers, the kind that slip off your heel as you’re turning. Get rid of them, even if they were a gift from your sister.
The long stretch in the afternoon
This is where the slow problems start.
When you sit for hours, the same few spots take your weight all day: the tailbone, the backs of the heels, the bony points of the hips. Pressure sores can start there sooner than most people think. Shift your weight every so often. Stand up during the TV ads. Ask someone to look at your heels once in a while, since you probably can’t see them, and if a red patch doesn’t fade after you’ve been off it for a bit, let your nurse or doctor know.
Then there’s water, which almost everyone gets wrong, including my mother. If every trip to the bathroom takes effort, it seems sensible to drink less. It isn’t. Not drinking enough makes dizziness more likely. It can also lead to constipation and urinary tract infections, and a UTI in an older person can cause confusion that looks a lot like something worse. Keep a full glass within reach and refill it more often than you want to.
Back to the chair. If standing up means rocking forward a few times and pushing hard on the armrests, the chair is working against you. That’s usually when families start looking at lift chairs for seniors. The seat tips forward slowly and helps you up, so your wrists and shoulders aren’t taking all the strain. Try a few in a showroom, ideally on a day when your joints are bad, and check that your feet sit flat on the floor. We eventually got rid of the blue recliner. Mom grumbled for a month and has defended the new one ever since.
Getting out of the house
I worry about this more than anything else above.
Once it gets hard to get around, people quietly stop going places. First it’s the farmers’ market, then the bank, then the Thursday coffee group they’ve gone to for eleven years. A few months later they’re home almost all the time and feeling low, and once you’re feeling low, the stretches and the water and everything else get much harder to keep up with.
For some people, a mobility scooter is what gets them out again. Talk to an occupational therapist before you buy one. They’ll look at your reach, your grip, and how you sit, which most salespeople won’t. Take it for a test drive somewhere real, like over a curb cut or through a grocery store aisle. Think about where you’ll store it, where you’ll plug it in overnight, and whether it fits in your car or folds down. Battery range matters more than top speed. Running out of charge three blocks from home in November is the kind of thing that makes people put a scooter in the garage and never use it again.
Odds and ends
Once a year, bring every pill bottle you have to your pharmacist and ask them to check the whole list. Some combinations can make people unsteady, and nobody notices because the prescriptions came from three different doctors. Put plug-in night lights along the route from the bed to the bathroom. Keep your phone on the nightstand, not across the room on the dresser.
One last thing for whoever is doing the caregiving. Let them do it themselves, even when it’s painfully slow to watch. My mother’s physio told me that once, quite firmly, while I was doing up Mom’s coat for her. She was right.
