September 9, 2025

We Can’t Accommodate

I am realizing more and more that while the Physical and Occupational therapists at the acute rehab centers in our general area are fantastic, well-trained, extremely hardworking, and motivators, they really don’t have all of the tools to accommodate everyone’s needs. Mom is medically complex but not nearly as medically complex as others. The more I get to know what the rehabs do not have, the more grateful I am for the setup we do have here at home for Mom.

She is now in the second Acute rehab that does not have a grab bar by the toilet on the side of her good arm. She is very hesitant to try to manage, even with help, in the private bathroom connected to her room at rehab, because she has a torn rotator cuff on the arm that would be used to grab the grab bar by the toilet to help her stand up and she cannot support herself with just that arm. She stated that everything is backwards from what she needs and has at home.

Every rehab asks about stairs in the home and Mom and Dad’s living space is on the main floor of the house so there are only two stairs down into the garage for her to get in and out of the house. We have measured the stairs and reported the measurements to every rehab and they insist that they cannot send Mom home until she demonstrates in PT at the rehab that she can climb up and down the two stairs. Here’s the catch though. They don’t have any stair setups in their gyms that are like the two stairs heading down into our garage. The rise is not the same. The run is not the same. It wouldn’t matter too much if Mom didn’t have bone on bone arthritic knees awaiting replacements, but when the stairs are bigger than what she has to do at home and they have angled railings on each side which is not what she uses. To get down the two steps she uses her walker or takes someone’s arm to help. To get up the two steps we have a curved grab bar mounted to the wall, one grab bar on either side of the wall so she can pull herself up one step at a time. They don’t have a set up at rehab that mimics that.

She has a grab ring in the middle of the bed (my parents have two twin mattresses that each are remote operated to recline or be raised similar to a hospital mattress). She has two very short stairs with railings that help her get up into bed with motion activated lights that turn on what she gets up at night to lead her to the bathrooms. Her rehab beds do not have steps up to them or railings. The bench and grab bars in the shower we have for her at home are different than what they have in the showers at the rehab. She is not really practicing to go home with the accommodations we have at home.

It would be great if they had more options to accommodate individuals and to simulate what they actually have at home.