by Carolyn L. Rosenblatt, RN, BSN, JD

Mikol's Mom, Alice, is doing fine at age 89. She is with it enough to get on a plane by herself and arrive in good condition. We enjoy our time together. We go on drives around our beautiful county and just hung out together. How fortunate we are that she has a great memory, exercises, and eats a healthy diet. She also remembers to take her medications and keeps track of every one. She knows the dosages and understands why she needs them.

Not everyone is so lucky as we are.

Take Thomas, whose mom is developing some problems with her memory. He is a loving son and lives near his parents. He checks in on them and they are doing pretty well so he really does not worry about them. Dad is 87 and Mom is 82. They are independent. They still drive. They take care of themselves. Except Mom was forgetting to take her pills. She had six left over at the end of the month, so she decided to take them all at once.

She ended up in the emergency room and is lucky to have survived! Thomas just got a wake up call that all is not fine and he needs to pay more attention.

It is great that medical advances allow us to live longer than ever and to enjoy our lives but it comes with a price. One aspect of that price is that we need medication to control various chronic conditions, such as heart disease or high blood pressure. Then, once we take one medication, it can have side effects. We may need another medication to offset those side effects, and so on. Pretty soon, dear old Dad is supposed to take 6 or 7 pills more than once a day.

It gets really complicated when aging parents are supposed to take some of them three times a day. Like anyone, our parents get distracted. They lose track of time. They have an appointment or an event and they forget to put the pills in a pocket or purse. What's the worst that can happen? They can take a fatal overdose or they can end up in the hospital.

Thomas did a search and found an electronic pill dispenser with an auditory alarm as well as a flashing light alarm. It can be set for twice a day. It lights up when it's time to take a pill and then the electronic alarm goes off for 5 minutes and repeats until the person opens the dispenser.

As both parents spend a lot of time at home, he can feel better about the fact that something is going to remind them when it's time for their medications.

This whole medication-forgetting incident is a red flag warning. A trip to the emergency room does not always end well. If a parent takes six days' worth of pills at once, it's a tip-off that something is going wrong with her judgment. Could it be an early sign of developing dementia?

Perhaps, or perhaps not, but it is definitely time to check out the reasons behind Mom's episode. "Just forgetting" is not an inconsequential thing. Some testing by a neuropsychologist may be in order. The emergency room physician is not going to suggest it. She or he is busy making sure that the elder is out of immediate danger and the doctor then moves on to the next patient. It's up to the family to take the follow up steps.

I am a huge fan of all the electronic devices that help us help our aging parents. New products are coming on the market all the time, given our aging population. And, with that, we still need to attend to the fact that our parents are aging and they are not going to be the same year after year. Devices can't take the place of our own observations and actions to help.

Thomas gets a free warning with few personal consequences when it comes to his Mom's episode. As we do at AgingParents.com, I encouraged him to use this as a reason to have the necessary conversation with his parents about their future. Of course, they hadn't discussed it at all. Does either parent have a Durable Power of Attorney? "No," says Thomas. How about a discussion about what would happen if either parent needed help at home? "Never talked about it yet", he says.

He will get some coaching from us on how to approach these topics and what he needs to cover. He will develop the confidence he needs to think ahead and be a watchful and responsible son. The trip to the ER has turned out to have unexpected benefits for Thomas.

We hope you will view Thomas' story in a positive light with confidence that you are doing the right thing, being concerned about and caring for your aging loved ones. We are with you.

Carolyn and Mikol of AgingParents.com