That Dad was having a heart attack, well, that was not really a shock. He was 81, and had averaged one every ten years or so since I was in college.

The shock was that, even with a pacemaker to keep his ticker ticking, his life as an independent man was over. His health was disintegrating, and the heart attack had triggered a landslide decline in his cognitive ability. He was very suddenly a dementia patient, too.

All at once it seemed, he had to leave the VA Medical Center in Salem, but he couldn’t go home. To our great relief, social workers at the VA excel at getting patients like Dad placed in nursing care. Though the first place he landed was a nightmare, and he returned to the hospital within a week, the second time he was released he wound up at the Virginia Veterans Care Center next to the VA. To his family's comfort, that became his home for the rest of his days.

Everything worked out as well as it could for Dad, who died in November. But looking back, I wonder, what if we’d had to go into the marketplace for nursing care on our own? I wouldn’t have known where to start except the yellow pages, and they don’t give you much but boasts and phone numbers.

I hope you never find yourself in the position my siblings and I were in last year, but if you do, you now have a place to start your search for senior care resources.

As part of The Roanoke Times’ series on the challenges of aging in the Roanoke area, Age of Uncertainty, I pulled together a searchable database and map of 110 different senior care resources in the Roanoke and New River valleys, including nursing homes, assisted living, adult day care, home health care and hospice services.

It won’t tell you everything you need to know, but if you’re at a loss for where to begin, it will at least help you narrow your list.

You can learn what resources are out there, and just as importantly, where they are. Your search results are plotted on a map. Dad nearly landed in a nursing home north of Fincastle, where I’m afraid he wouldn’t have enjoyed the company of his children as much as he did in Roanoke.

Because money matters, you can find out which resources accept Medicare, Medicaid, and for assisted living facilities, state department of social services grants.

And for nursing homes, check out the details pages to see results of the most recent health and fire safety inspections, along with the average time both nurses and certified nursing assistants spend with patients in a day. That’s a figure that, in my experience, really matters. It’s a measure of how much you or your mom or dad will really be attended to.

With all that, there’s so much more to learn about what these facilities offer. For more detail, check out the Roanoke area LOA website to see their very thorough guide to senior resources, or contact the New River Valley Agency on Aging.

Or do your own online search at www.medicare.gov or the Virginia Department for the Aging.

Help in finding what you need for yourself, your spouse or your parent is out there. We just hope we can aid you in finding it when you need it – even if that time comes on suddenly, like it did for my family.

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• Posted by Matt Chittum in HealthHealth
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