Business focus: Caregiver makes home a nursing home

POST FALLS – In her mind, Lorraine Frederick was traveling to a distant place, her face aglow and memories her guide as she went to see the doctor, visit her brother or along some other subconscious journey. But Frederick’s siblings are no longer alive, she didn’t leave her wheelchair and she was never far from the watchful eye of Amanda Witthauer, her caregiver for the past few months at Sunset Homes, a new Post Falls adult family home run by the Witthauer family.

For Frederick, who has Alzheimer’s disease, this was a good day. Snippets from her past would briefly light up her face, a smile would stretch from ear to ear and sometimes she would let others in on where she was or who she was going to see.

As her caregiver approached from behind, Frederick looked up. “Who is this?” she asked, as she maneuvered her wheelchair toward the hallway.

“It’s me,” Witthauer replied, wrapping her arms around Frederick’s shoulders and smoothing out her ponytail. “Where are you going?”

“I already went,” Frederick replied, letting out a soft laugh as she continued down the hall.

“She knows me from day-to-day,” Witthauer explained about their many hours and weeks spent together. “In her mind, she thinks she’s going somewhere. … She knows exactly what’s going on in her head.”

But Witthauer knows that with Alzheimer’s disease, an irreversible and progressive neurological disorder, the good days and the bad days come and go, as unpredictable as the disease itself. Witthauer is here for both and has built her life around helping those who are afflicted with the incurable disease as well as their coping families.

“I’ve always been around that type of thing,” Witthauer said, referring to her childhood when she visited nursing homes with her grandmother, a social worker. Since then, Witthauer’s been dedicated to helping others: as a special education teacher, in a variety of health care settings including nursing homes, and as a 911 operator in Kootenai County. That last job of answering emergency calls all day proved to be too much, Witthauer said, because she didn’t know what happened to those people after help arrived. “I cried a lot,” she said. “I took my job home with me, and I took it hard. I tip my hat to people who can do that.”

Now, she’s taken her work home with her, literally. Earlier this year in the Witthauer family’s home on Rawhide Ridge, Amanda and husband, Ralph, decided to open a business dedicated to giving the elderly proper care. That meant opening their doors to people whose behavior was unpredictable, but who would nonetheless be welcomed as family. With their home certified by the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare and Amanda certified in caregiving and dispensing medications, Sunset Homes was cleared to allow four permanent residents at a time to live with the couple and their four children.

“I think it’s better in a setting like this, it’s more of a home setting compared to a hospital,” Amanda Witthauer explained, while seated in the living room of her home along with Frederick and Jeanene, the home’s other resident patient. In hospitals, Amanda Witthauer added, there is staff turnover and many more patients to the number of trained employees, which means less individual attention. “You don’t have time to develop a relationship like you do here.”

At Sunset Homes the patients are more than just guests. They have around-the-clock attention, home-cooked meals, a safe environment, personal attention for everything including lotion and makeup, because, as their caregiver said, “they both are beauty queens. They love to be dressed up.”

“I think of them as my own family,” Amanda said, adding that her kids have come to call Frederick “grandma.” And when dealing with a degenerative disease that can overtake someone so quickly, she believes that providing a comfortable environment with constant care until the very end is paramount. “We believe that once they are here, they’ll be here until they pass,” she said.

Having the Witthauer’s four boys – ages 2, 4, 10 and 12 – in the house has proven to be beneficial for the elderly residents, too. “They are so therapeutic,” Amanda said. When asked if she’s worried about having her kids always around terminally ill patients, she said: “I think it makes kids, boys especially, more compassionate. I think they have a real value for life. … Just spending the day with these two makes you have a real appreciation for life.”

Up until a few months ago, Frederick had been in a Coeur d’Alene nursing home for several years. Once her daughter, Jacquie Long, was told about Sunset Homes, she made the move right away. Since then, she said the transformation in her mom has been extraordinary.

“The change in her is just amazing. She has so many good days now,” Long said. “She just gets such good care; it’s just the personal touch from Amanda. I really thought my mother was passed the point of having good days. … I feel like I’ve got her back in a way.”

Though it may be a small adult family home with limited space, Witthauer believes it’s a step in the right direction in humanizing a nationwide problem. “These elderly people are not getting the care they need,” she said, her passion for the issue showing through. While acknowledging that her new job is demanding, it’s a position the mother of four and full-time caregiver gladly accepts. “When you think of it, you have to really love elderly people to do it. … If you don’t, you’re going to drown in it,” she said. “I think I’m meant to take care of people.”