Help for the Sandwich Generation

After I finish writing this blog posting, I'm going to pick up my mom at the airport. She's coming back after five weeks of taking care of her 92-year-old father in a nursing home in in his native Puerto Rico, 3,000 miles away from where Mom lives now.

He had entered the home in January and was adapting fine, so much that we three were going to take a Caribbean cruise together last month. But a week before departure, my mom got a 3 a.m. call from the nursing home -- blood was found in Grandpa's urine. My mom had to pay $900 for an earlier flight and when she arrived, she found a host of problems -- he had deep-vein thrombosis from lying in bed too much, the nursing-home care was on the lax side (the blood came from catheters inserted improperly, and when his daily dose of aspirin ran out, no one bothered to replenish it ), and he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.