Managing Diabetes As A Senior: 5 Important Ways Assisted Living Makes It Easier And Safer
Seniors face many challenges in life, especially if they live alone. Add diabetes to the mix, and the scenario becomes even more difficult to manage, presenting new and persistent dangers. Assisted living is a positive, often all-encompassing solution, where a senior is able to enjoy life more, with less worry and disease-related complications, especially when dealing with diabetes. This is how they can help:
1. Meeting Specific Nutritional Needs
Diabetes usually demands a person eat a highly specific diet, avoiding foods that tend to exacerbate unresolved blood-glucose issues. Most assisted living facilities feature an elegant dining room and three square meals a day. Tailoring a menu to a diabetic is something they already do, including making the meals visually appealing and tasty.
2. Maintaining A Doctor-Recommended Exercise Regimen
Exercising may be more of a challenge for most seniors, especially if they're dealing with painful conditions that make movement difficult, such as arthritis. Moving into a friendly, caring community should make meeting a doctor-recommended exercise program more enjoyable, and, therefore, more likely to be done. Staff may offer to walk with a resident, for safety or companionship, or a new resident might sign up for a class, where many residents join in on the healthy exercise, with a little bit of socialization on the side.
3. Keeping Up With Medicine
Medication needs for diabetics can frequently change, making it difficult to keep up with insulin dosage and other vital prescriptions. Assisted living can provide medical help, reminding a resident to take a certain medicine at a certain time and at a certain dosage. They're also there to aid a senior in refilling these important meds if needed.
4. Decreasing Stress And The Fear Of Living Alone
Living alone as a senior is frightening enough, but with diabetes, it's even scarier. That constant fear manifests itself physically, in the form of dangerous stress. Stress for a diabetic may mean a spike in blood glucose levels, which might necessitate an increase in insulin or other compensatory measures.
Also, the fear of living alone for some seniors provides additional stress, as they worry about falling somewhere in the home, without anyone being able to help them get up. Falls are particularly dangerous to older folks, as their bodies have a harder time healing and their immune systems might not be capable of fighting off all the germs met in a hospital environment during recovery.
5. Infusing Positivity Into Every Day
Because so many problems are solved for the senior diabetic, the assisted living environment should infuse a lot of positivity into their daily lives. This generally improves overall health and definitely boosts mood and energy.
Beyond meeting new friends and having so many complicated aspects of life under control, a nursing home or assisted living facility helps resolve some of the more stubborn issues diabetics are faced with. Since this disease is so prevalent and can be so threatening to anyone, most especially the elderly, a few helping hands go a long way.
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