I came home for my mother
For years I lived on Salt Spring Island, in British Columbia. If you have not been: it is a small place in the Gulf Islands, reached by ferry, the kind of island where the day is organized around the boat. I had work I liked and a life I had built on purpose, a long way from where I started.
Where I started is St. Louis, Missouri. That is where my mother, Carol, still lived — in her own house, with her own routines, doing what she had always done, which was handle it.
The phone calls
Carol has type 1.5 diabetes, which is the kind that arrives in adulthood and gets mistaken for type 2 for a while. She has managed it for a long time and she is good at it. She also has dementia, and the two together are a bad combination in a specific way: managing diabetes is a constant series of small, correctly-timed decisions, and dementia is a disease of small, correctly-timed decisions.
For a while I did what everyone does from a distance. I called. I asked how her numbers were. She told me they were fine, and she believed it, and sometimes it was even true. I learned to read the pauses. Then the phone calls got easier to interpret instead of harder, which was worse, because the thing I was hearing was that she had stopped tracking what she could not track any more.
You can be two thousand miles away and know that something is wrong. What you cannot do from two thousand miles away is walk into the kitchen and look.
Moving back
I moved back to St. Louis. Not for a visit, not for a rough patch — back. I know what that sentence costs, because I paid it, and I know a lot of people reading this are somewhere in the middle of deciding whether to pay it themselves.
Being in the house changed the problem completely, and not always in the direction I expected. Some of what I had been afraid of turned out to be manageable in ten minutes a day. What actually mattered was smaller and stranger: her sensor had been alarming for weeks into an empty room. Her phone had been on silent since a grandchild borrowed it. Every device she owned was working exactly as designed, and not one of them was reaching a human being.
Building what did not exist
I started making things, because that is what I have always done.
Her FreeStyle Libre 3 sensor had an app, and the app had alarms, and the alarms lived on a phone that was not always in the same room as my mother. So I built something that reads her sensor every few minutes, checks it against her own target range, and when it matters, says so out loud on the speaker in whichever room she is standing in. It puts the same reading on a dashboard I can open from anywhere, and it texts me when she goes genuinely low. It is not an alarm system — her own device alarms are still the safety net, and they always will be. It is the layer on top that means I do not have to wonder.
Then there was the rest of the family. People who love her, scattered, all wanting to help, all working from whatever they last heard. So I built the portal: her calendar, what happened this week, when I am away and who is covering, and a way for anyone to ask to take her out to dinner without it turning into a four-day text thread. The answer goes on her real calendar, which is the one she actually looks at.
Then the small things that turn out not to be small. Reminders that happen out loud in the room she is standing in, instead of on a screen she has put down somewhere. A tablet with everything removed from it except the one button that calls my sister. Photographs from the family that simply appear on the screen beside her chair, with nothing for her to do.
Why this is a business
Every single one of those things I built twice: once badly, and once properly, after finding out how it fails at two in the morning. The second version is the one worth having.
And somewhere along the way I noticed something about the help my mother had been getting before I came home. Every store, every help line and every well-meaning relative had the same problem: they were in a hurry. They fixed the thing, fast, and left her no better able to deal with it the next time. The technology was never really the hard part. The patience was.
That is what The Makers, LLC is for. Tech help for seniors in St. Louis County, from someone who will sit down, explain it in plain English, and still be there next week — for phones and computers and scam worries, and for the health technology I learned the hard way, starting with the FreeStyle Libre 3 on my mother’s arm.
My mother knows this website exists and knows what is on it. Her name is on it because she agreed to it, and the health information in the family portal is there because she agreed to that too, with a record of it on file. That is not a legal detail to us. She is a person, not a case study, and she gets to decide who knows what about her.