Community News

For the most updated information:

View Current Bulletin

You Must have Adobe Reader to view the Bulletin. Click here to download it

 

Pilgrimage to
Our Lady of La Salette

The Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette cordially invite you to join them in the Annual Pilgrimage, Sunday, October 5, 2008 to the beautiful shrine of Our Lady of La Salette in Double Adobe, Arizona.  1:00 pm Holy hour, confessions, rosary, healing services, concelebrated Mass at 2:45 pm.
Two buses leave Trader Joe’s parking lot at 8:00 am, N.E. corner of Oracle and Magee. Arrival at the shrine at 11:00 am.
Bus Tickets: Adults - $20.00 Child - $10.00
Bring your own lunch, beverages provided. For more information and bus schedule please contact Steve Domingo at 297-4066; mobile 820-0091 or email: stevedomingo@comcast.net.

PCC Performing Arts Presents
A Thousand Cranes
by Kathryn Schultz Miller

September 24 through October 5, Proscenium Theater Recommended for grades 3rd - 8th The production is based on the true and uplifting story of young Sadako Sasaki, dramatized through movement and music. Sadako was only two years old when the atom bomb fell on Hiroshima during World War II. She survived without a scratch, but several years later is stricken with radiation sickness. The crane, in Japan, is one of the mystical or sacred beasts and is said to live for a thousand years. An ancient Japanese legend promises that if a sick person folds a thousand cranes, the gods will grant the wish and make the person healthy again. Urged by her friends and her grandmother’s spirit, Sadako begins to fold a thousand paper cranes. Relevant and visually beautiful, it teaches children about hope, tradition and peace. The play directed by Betsy Kruse Craig, features a cast of 17 students and a lovely stylized Asian set. Call the box office at 206-6986 for tickets and information.

Catholic Community Services

Jesus saves us from our worst selves. Jesus Christ is Lord and he keeps prodding us to become better people and better followers by going the extra mile for others. Catholic Community Services programs’ staff knows that what we do for others takes time, effort and dedication, and our participants benefit.
I f you wish to be part of this ministry (volunteer) or are in need of assistance, call 623-0344 or 1-800-234-0344.

Congregation of Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration

Centering Prayer Group
Mondays at 7:30 pm
September 15 to December 15, 2007
At the Benedictine Monastery
800 N. Country Club Rd., Tucson 85716
Introduction to Centering Prayer Mini Workshop September 8
Jesus & Buddha. Paths to Awakening

9/15 Practicing Awareness
9/22 Spiritual Awakening
9/29 Buddhism 101 Part I
10/06 Buddhism 101 Part II

Suggested offering $3.00 per evening. Please register at the door. For additional information, please contact Sr.  Anita at 325-6401.

Worldwide Marriage Encounter

In today’s gospel it says that “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” God loves us and cares for us. He wants for married couples to have happy fulfilling sacramental marriages. The next Worldwide Marriage Encounter weekends are September 26-28 in Flagstaff, October 3-5 in Tucson, and November 7-9 in Phoenix. Contact: (602) 242-6141 or curtwessel@cox.net.

Vocations Discernment Group

The Vocations Office is forming a second career priesthood discernment group for men 35-55 years old. If you are a practicing Catholic, unmarried, love the Mass, are basically happy, but looking for more in your life, you might consider joining the group. We will be meeting monthly to discuss, pray and discern about priestly vocations in the Diocese of Tucson. If you are interested, please contact the Vocations Office at (520) 838-2531 or vocations@diocesetucson.org.

CELEBRATING A SPECIAL
WEDDING ANNIVERSARY IN 2008?

If you or someone you know will be celebrating their 25th or 50th wedding anniversary in 2008, Bishop Kicanas would like to know. Bishop Kicanas will celebrate a special Mass for these couples on Sunday, September 21, 2008 at 2:00 pm at St. Augustine Cathedral.
Please call the parish office for a registration form. We will forward this information to the Bishop’s Office and the couple will receive a personal invitation to the event.

Who is My Neighbor?

 
Christ delivered important lessons about how we should live our lives and be able to access the peace He     promised would be ours, in the form of stories and parables.  At first God chose to give His people a set of rules which were quite plain and direct. No chance of   misunderstanding there.  Don’t kill, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, all pretty clear.  But there is much more to living a good and peaceful life.  

So Christ’s message was about love.  He summed up the original law given to Moses in just five words; Love God, Love your neighbor.  I believe that the reason Christ spent three years  telling us to love God and  our fellow man was because those principles are at very the heart of living a happy and peaceful life.  But if this message were all that was necessary for us to hear, why did Christ put so much time and effort in hammering that message home over and over.  I think it was because He wanted to impress on us that loving in the true sense of the word has nothing to do with whether we like our “neighbor”. Love transcends our emotional responses to life.  Christ was telling us that love is an act of the will, it is something we actively choose to do and is not subject to whether we approve of our neighbor, or whether we like him. And it is not limited to just the neighbors who live near by. 

We know that when any teacher is finished with the  lesson plan, he or she wants to see if the students have really learned the lesson, so at the end of the school year, a test is usually given.

Being a rabbi, Christ also wanted to know whether we “got it”, and so at the very end of His life, there was a test.  When Christ was arrested and  being held by Pilate, it was the custom of the Romans to release a  Jewish prisoner as a political gesture.  Pilate gave the people gathered there a choice; Jesus, a revolutionary, who preached forgiveness and love of God and neighbor as a formula to solve the problems of the world and who pointed out the path which leads inevitably to peace,  or Barabbas, a revolutionary, who chose war, hatred and killing and his path which leads to more hatred and     killing.  The people there, our representatives, freely choose Barabbas.  I wonder what Christ must have felt at that moment. We didn’t get it.  

Recently, the New York Times reported  that at least 20% of the people interviewed upon exiting the voting booth in West Virginia, stated that they would not vote for a black candidate.  Racism is still alive and well in America.  After all the pain and misery bigotry and hatred have caused through the ages we still don’t get it! 

Phil Wentzel

 

National Alliance on Mental Illness
of Southern Arizona

Does depression, bi-polar disorder, schizophrenia or any other type of mental illness exist within your family? 

Have you asked — What do I do in crisis? How do I take care of myself? How can I communicate better with my loved one with a mental illness? NAMISA, the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Southern Arizona offers the educational course Family to Family.

Please call us for more information at 622-5582 or visit us on the web at: www.namisa.org.

 

Alzheimer's Disease Research

What is Alzheimer’s Disease?
It is a progressive, irreversible brain disorder whose incidence rises sharply with advancing age. The average length of the illness is 7 years, but can last as long as 20 years or more. There is no cure. Alzheimer’s always ends in death.

What Causes Alzheimer’s Disease?
Research indicates that the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease are the result of the death of nerve cells in distinct areas of the brain. Scientist do not know what causes the loss of those cells.

How Widespread is Alzheimer’s Disease?
Alzheimer’s is the 7th leading cause of death among the elderly in the US, claiming almost 66,000 lives annually.  The disease affects an estimated 4.5 million individuals. It affects all segments of the population and is not restricted to any one race, gender or socioeconomic class.

What is the Impact of Alzheimer’s Disease in Dollars and Cents?
The total US cost for the care and treatment of Alzheimer’s patients has reached $100 billion a year. Caring for a patient at home costs the average family between $18,000 and $36,000 per year. Nursing home care costs even more, averaging $74,000 annually.  For more information on Alzheimer’s Disease, call Alzheimer’s Disease Research at 301-948-3244 or 1-800-437-2423, or visit our website at www.ahaf.org.

 

 

The “How To” of Long Term Care: 
A Guide to Placing a Loved One in a Nursing Facility

Written and submitted by Parishioner, Philip Wentzel

When the Director of the all-volunteer Ombudsman program answers the phone in his office at the Pima Council on Aging (Tucson, Az), the most likely conversation goes something like this: “I am thinking of placing my mother (father, grandmother, uncle, etc.) in a nursing home. Can you refer me to a good one?”

It is impossible to give a meaningful answer without knowing a great deal about the prospective patient. What is the family’s ability to pay, to what extent the family will be involved in the care of the loved one after placement, whether the individual has special needs, etc. It is usually the spouse or adult child of the patient who is faced with the responsibility of making the decision. The reasons are as varied as the people involved in the decision making process. But the usual rationale is that the family members have decided that they do not have the ability to take care of the loved one at home any longer. It has become necessary to hand over that responsibility to strangers in an environment completely alien to both the patient and the decision makers. 

Once the choice is made, the son or daughter may actually feel relieved that he parent is now receiving the care and attention required, but for the patient and a spouse the changes are many and profound.  From this point on, every decision the patient used to make on his or her own or with family, will now be made by a group of strangers. When and what to eat, when to sleep, what activities to participate in; in fact, every aspect of daily living depends on the decisions of others. Usually the patient has little or no input.  As one patient put it: “You haven’t lived until you have to go to the bathroom on someone else’s schedule.”

The patient’s home is now centered around their bed where they will spend the majority of their time. The patient will most likely be sharing a room with a stranger who may moan all night, be incoherent, and/or insist on having the TV sound turned up high because of a hearing deficit.  Just about everything the patient valued in life, all the familiar and reassuring things of the home environment are now gone. There is no feeling of being an individual any more. The patient doesn’t own anything except clothes and a few personal items.  And unless the family takes the patient’s clothes home to be washed, they will gradually disappear. Anything of value will most likely be stolen. The patient becomes institutionalized over time and gradually loses any sense of power over their lives.

As far as privacy is concerned, their isn’t any. Staff and others can (and do) walk into the patient’s room at will.  No wonder the majority of the patients, even in the best of facilities, suffer major depression. Often there is no provision to treat this condition except with anti-depressant medication, which is usually ineffective. Medication does nothing to change the environment nor to help the patient begin to cope more adequately with the change in quality of life they are experiencing.

Home cooked meals are a thing of the past for the patient. Mostly bland, tasteless food is the fare. It is unfortunate that even this potential for relieving stress is the subject of complaint on a consistent basis in most long-term-care facilities.

The law requires that the residents be represented by a Resident’s Council which is to meet once a month, and to which any resident may belong. In theory, the residents are to discuss their experience while in the facility, make recommendations, and work with the administration to improve their quality of life. In fact the administration rarely attends the meetings, and few if any recommendations are followed up, particularly if there is a cost involved. Besides, most patients are afraid to complain of abuse or neglect, fearing retaliation from staff.

So what can one do to find place where one can feel reasonably certain that their loved one is in the best of all possible facilities?  Well, it isn’t easy, but there are some things the responsible person can and should do before committing a loved one to a long-term-care facility. However, be warned that what I am about to advise is not as easy as making a phone call, and certainly more time consuming than a cursory visit.  Be aware that the placement of your loved one in a long-term-care facility is not just handing over the responsibility to a group of professionals and that your responsibility to her/him is now in someone else’s hands. Rather your new role now becomes that of an advocate for your loved one’s care. To make sure that your loved one is getting proper care and timely treatment, your must be actively involved. It is difficult to imagine how an elderly patient can manage on their own without an advocate, even in the best facility.  The sad fact is that without someone to advocate for them many patients just fall through the cracks. An example will illustrate my point.

This story was told to me by an advocate of a resident who had MS and was confined to a wheel chair. She had spasticity in her leg and stiffness in her left arm due to a stroke. The advocate had been trying for months to alleviate her depression. After finally convincing her primary care provider, the client was referred to a P.C. physician to evaluate her potential for benefiting from physical therapy. The doctor recommended that the patient receive Botox injections in certain muscles. That way she would have a greater range of mobility and be able to participate in here physical therapy more profitably.  After some delay caused by a misunderstanding by the facility staff over who was to make the appointment for the Botox treatment, the primary doctor finally wrote a referral and sent it to the health provider for approval. After no response from the provider for two weeks, the advocate questioned the nurse in charge of the patient’s ward. He was told that the provider was waiting for some additional information, but seemed uncertain as to what the information consisted of. Two more weeks went by with no response. The advocate called the Case Manager who claimed that he was unable to resolve the problem after he called the provider. So the advocate decided to call the provider directly.  After talking to at least six different persons at the provider’s offices, he finally reached the nurse in charge of the file. It turned out the problem was that the referring doctor had not indicated the name of the neurologist who could perform the Botox treatment since not every neurologist does this treatment. The advocate then called a neurologist group referred to by the nurse at the provider’s office. He was told that one of the neurologists in the group did administer Botox injections. He got the name of the doctor, reported back to the provider and was told that the file was now complete and would be approved immediately.

If the advocate had not used his initiative, the referral probably would never have been acted upon, since no one else was willing to find out what the problem was and act to resolve it.  This is a classic example as to how neither the case manager, the facility’s staff, the patient’s doctor, nor the insurance provider did anything to resolve the issue, when all it took was a simple phone call. Everyone felt it was someone else’s responsibility.

Here are nine specific things I would recommend before and after deciding on any particular facility:

Before placement:

1. Make that visit to the care center, but don’t leave after your visit with the administrator and/or the director of nursing. Instead, wander around the facility. Talk to patients who are presently living there. Ask questions, e.g. what is their biggest complaint? How long does it take for someone to answer their call light? What activities do they enjoy? What would they like to see changed? Is there anyone on staff that they do not like? When was the last time they saw a doctor?

2. Ask to join the patients for lunch and dinner. These experiences can tell you volumes about the quality, quantity and tastiness of the food, and also the quality and timeliness of the service. Look around. Are the people who need help eating getting it? What is the general atmosphere in the dining room? Do you feel comfortable there? Is it the kind of place your loved one would like?

3. Ask about the recreational activities. Talk to the Activities Director. Ask about the program and his/her credentials. Ask to see some recent projects.  4. On your journey through the facility, use your eyes and your nose. Is the overall appearance clean? Is the air fresh? Or are there offensive odors?

5. Attend a Resident’s Council meeting. What are the complaints? What are the favorable things discussed? How many residents are present? Any administrative personnel present? 

After placement:

1. Get to know the State Certified Ombudsman. One is assigned to every facility to monitor for abuse and/or neglect of patients by staff or other patients. His or her name and phone number should be posted in the lobby. Check with the ombudsman on a regular basis. He/she will be glad to talk to you about your concerns, and can act if your loved one has complained of rough treatment, abusive language, threats, or abridgement of the patient’s civil rights.

2. Visit on a regular basis, and not always on the same day or time. This way you will get to know most of the personnel responsible for your loved one’s care. Also temps are used whenever staff is short handed. If your loved one complains of rough treatment, neglect, or abusive or degrading language etc. talk to the nurse. If it happens a second time, tell the ombudsman. If it happens a third time, ask for a meeting with staff and the administrator, and report the violation to Adult Protective Services.  Keep in mind, the more you are involved, the less likely your loved one will experience these kinds of problems.

3. By law, every long term care facility and assisted living facility must hold a Care Plan meeting every 90 days with various administrative and direct caretakers present. Patients and family members are to notified in advance when such meetings are scheduled.  Patients and their families (theoretically) are invited to attend. In practice, however, patients, let alone family members, are hardly ever notified when these meetings will take place.

4. The rational is that the staff knows what’s best for the patient, and that the presence of non staff members are likely to turn the meeting into a gripe session. To compound the problem (for the client and family) is that the decisions made at these meetings rarely are shared with either the patient or the patient’s families. It is important that both the patient and the person who is acting as advocate attend. Be sure to prepare an agenda in advance so the patient has an opportunity for input of his/her concerns.  Ask about the medications your loved one is receiving, and their purpose. These meetings serve as a blueprint for the care of the patient during the next quarter. Being an informed participant in the process makes it easier to monitor whether the plan is being implemented. The AHCCCS (Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System) program in Arizona mandates a patient be seen by a Nurse Practitioner at least every 60 days.  The rule used to be that patients be seen by a doctor, but to cut expenses, the rule was changed. Ask who is the patient’s doctor and/or nurse practitioner, and when was the last time the resident was visited by either one.

9. Read and become familiar with the laws governing the administration of long-term care facilities. The knowledge may come in handy one day!  If you do your homework, the decision to place your loved one in a facility will become less difficult, because you will have the peace of mind knowing you have done all you can to choose wisely.  Finally, the best thing for your loved one is to help him/her understand that this is their new home, and that you will do what you can to support their efforts to adapt. Once your loved one is settled in and has begun to adapt, it will become easier for both of you to accept the changes made necessary by circumstances.

Phil Wentzel, MA, MFT (Certified Ombudsmen, State of Arizona) 5769 N. Tigua Dr., Tucson, 85704; (520) 293-6345.

 

Thank You, St. Odilia's Bulletin Advertisers!!!

The St. Odilia's weekly bulletin is subsidized completely by those companies whose advertisements appear on the last two pages. If you have the opportunity, you may thank them in the name of our parish by using their products or services.  Should you desire to  participate as a sponsor of our bulletin, you may contact J. S. Paluch Company at 800-566-6170.