Interview with Arbourside Court family member, April Farral

The primary thing for me with Arbourside Court is the staff. I find the staff to be absolutely phenomenal. They all seem to go above and beyond what one might expect to be happening. They have great patience. With my mum, she’s 101, so at times she can get confused a little bit at times. It doesn’t matter how many times she’ll phone the front desk, and she’ll phone even Tanya Miller, the general manager. My mom will phone her in the morning and say, “Hi, it’s just me. I just wanted to let you know I’m still alive.” They’re fabulous. They just laugh, and they’re all, “Good, Alice, we love you.” It feels more like they’re a big family than staff. I appreciate that immensely.

It’s fantastic. It’s so fantastic that they’ve just started up their happy hour again. Prior to COVID, I didn’t manage it every week, but most Fridays I would go over and I’d have happy hour, bring my mom down, and we’d sit and have our wine and a chit-chat with all the other residents. They have different games that they play and they do bingo, and they have little outings and there’s always something to do. It’s really a great community and great camaraderie, and the social aspect of it is fantastic.

Arbourside Court is not a huge building; it’s not one of those gigantic senior places. I think it’s a lovely size. It’s really, really pretty. It’s very clean. It’s always kept up. You never look and think, "Oh, that doesn’t look good," or, "Oh, that smells bad." It’s always very clean, very tidy, never cluttered.

It’s very open, it’s very modern and up to date as far as the decor and the colors. They always have plants and flowers around on the first floor. They have an amenities bar that's open during the day, where they put out coffee and tea and juices and cookies and muffins and things like that. They have a little courtyard area up front that is just beautiful, where there’s a little barbecue, beautiful flowers, and benches. The barbecue is actually something where family members can even come in, and you can go out there and barbecue and have that time together. So it’s really lovely the way it’s laid out.

Arbourside Court has an in-house laundry, so residents can either do their own laundry or have it done for them. They have weekly housekeeping, which I also really appreciate, so I don’t have to clean my house and my mom’s place. They come in once a week, and they strip out her bed and do all her linens and remake her bed. They take all of her linens from her kitchen and her bathroom. They clean the entire place. It’s lovely.

She has a one-bedroom, so she’s got a full kitchen, full-size fridge, dishwasher, full-sized stove, and she’s got a little area, a little closet for storage. We use it for storage, but it’s actually rigged up to accommodate washers and dryers if one wanted to have a washer and dryer in the suite. She’s got a full bathroom with a tub and a shower. We did have Arbourside cut part of the side of the tub out so that she can safely step in and out, which I think is a huge feature.

She’s got a large living area with a little dining room area. She’s got a lovely large-size room with a big window and a door that goes out onto the balcony. She has a large bedroom that accommodates all of her bedroom furniture, which was lovely. She didn’t have to lose any of that sort of stuff, with big closets in there, lots of closet and storage space. That is very important because most everyone is probably coming from homes where they’ve been living forever, and they have lots of stuff, so there’s always storage there. It’s lovely.

Prior to moving Mom to Arbourside Court, which was four years ago, she was living on her own in a townhouse, and she had had a horrendous accident nine years ago. I was having to increasingly spend more and more and more time with her. Not that I minded spending time with my mother, but I was getting to the point where I was practically living with her, and it was really getting difficult to manage my household and my life. I really didn’t feel comfortable leaving her all the time by herself because getting lonely was her biggest thing.

The real value for me and for my mom has been the sense of community, the sense of security, Mom knowing that she’s not alone, that she can go downstairs at any time, and there’s always somebody there. That is the same for me as well, that when I’m working, or I’m away, I don’t have to worry about her because I know her meals are being taken care of, her cleaning is being taken care of, and most importantly for me is that she has that social interaction, that there’s always somebody there for her.

I get more of a feeling of community and more of a feeling of family atmosphere. I never go in there and feel like I am in a care facility. It doesn’t feel like that at all. It’s nice and bright, and the people are so friendly and giving and happy and genuinely seem happy to see you and see other people, see the residents, et cetera. I just find it to be more of a community type of feeling rather than an old folks home.

It is honestly like night and day. Mom had a horrendous fall nine years ago, and she came back from it relatively well, remarkably well. She actually wasn’t supposed to survive, and so we got her back from that, but then she started into a real depressive nosedive. I think that was primarily because she didn’t have interaction with other people.

We were having a real struggle with her to do anything really. I couldn’t get her to go out to do anything. I was having trouble getting her to eat, having trouble getting her to even drink anything. She was really starting to decline physically and also mentally, but more of a depression than dementia. Physically, she was really going downhill.

When I moved her into Arbourside Court, she initially said, “Well, I’m not staying here.” She wanted to go home, and I think that’s very common. But it didn’t take her any time at all. She settled in very nicely and made all sorts of new friends and even had a boyfriend who was twelve years younger than she was. She very quickly acclimated.

We had her weight up by 30 pounds in under six months, which was fabulous to see because she’d gotten far too thin. So we got the weight back up, which then helped balance out her electrolytes and her blood sugars, and everything was just better that way. They also have two other amenities in-house. They have a hairdresser, and they have a lovely gal who does manicures and pedicures. Mom gets her hair done weekly, and she gets a manicure and a pedicure weekly. That was all fabulous too.

I would say to really sit with your loved one and make sure that you have their little or big list of things that are non-negotiable, things that they must have, whether these are things that they feel they must have or the caretaker feels must be there. For me, I had to have that cutout in the tub for safety. You want to make sure that things like that are in place. The grab bars for toilets, tubs, and showers need to be in place.

You want to make sure of what amenities there are that are important for your loved one. If you have someone who typically is social, you want to make sure that they have social activities going on that they can attend easily on their own. You want to really check out the food, because some of these places, the food cannot be the greatest. You want to check out the dietary needs and the foods and whether they can adhere to specific dietary needs. If you have somebody who’s diabetic, for instance, you want to make sure that they’re not being served a whole bunch of sugary whatevers, or somebody who has an allergy or sensitivity to gluten, and that type of thing. You want to make sure that the food that is provided is going to work for your loved one.

I would suggest to anyone who is considering transitioning their parents into a retirement spot such as Arbourside Court that they don’t even bother looking anywhere else. You cannot be disappointed by going to Arbourside because it’s always so clean and fresh, and bright in its physical appearance. Then there are always these wonderful staff members around, even cleaning staff that you pass in the hallway, saying, “Oh, hi, April, how are you today? How’s your mom? Alice?” It’s a wonderful, wonderful place. It’s welcoming, it’s friendly, it’s safe. I have, and I do, recommend people go and check out Arbourside. You will not be disappointed.

Dramatically! I was having to go weekly, daily, to make her meals, to try to make sure that she was eating, and doing everything for her. With her moving into Arbourside Court, I could take a deep breath of release and step back. I didn’t have to be so worried about her. I can sleep at night because I’m not afraid that I’m going to get a phone call in the middle of the night because she’s scared, which was happening when she was by herself in the townhouse. I can actually know better now what food I have in my cupboard and in my fridge than in my mother’s because I had actually gotten to the point where I would get confused because I was at her place so often, making dinners. When I would go grocery shopping, I’d be picking up stuff, and I’d bring it home and then realise, "Oh, I already have that here, this is for Mum’s place," or vice versa.

My stress level has gone down dramatically, and my ease and comfort levels have gone up dramatically. I feel very comfortable having my mom there. I know that she’s very well taken care of, that there are people around who just love her and treat her like family. So it’s helped my emotional status also.

The two primary things for me were that it was close to me, which I know that won’t be the case for everyone, and that it doesn’t have that old home place look or smell or any of that. It’s lovely and clean and bright, and that was important to me. I didn’t want her going in somewhere that smelled and looked like an old people’s home.

From the first moment that we got to Arbourside Court, it was so welcoming. By “we” I mean myself and my brother and my mom. We were invited to come in and have a free lunch with the manager, and that really sold us. We walked about the whole place. We saw a couple of different units, and then we went down and had a lovely lunch, and Mum seemed really excited about it. When we first arrived and came into the underground parking, Mom said, “Well, they probably wouldn’t let me move in anyway.” I said, “Why is that?” She said, “Well, I mean, I have a walker.” Then you look over, and you see the sea of parked motorized go-carts lined up all the way around in the parking lot. I said, “See those? I don’t think your walker is going to be an issue.” It was just welcoming.

The cleanliness, the openness of design, the brightness, all of that mattered. All of the rooms, all of the suites, as well as the common areas, are very bright and open and beautifully decorated. You never feel like you’re in a dark, dingy anything. It’s always beautiful and bright and open, which is important. I think that having natural light also really helps boost people’s emotions.

It was a very smooth move, but you definitely want to start that ahead of time. In our case, Mom had been in her townhouse for, I think, about 25 years, and so we started quite some time before packing everything up and arranging for people to come who wanted things we were donating. We donated a lot of things to charity and sold a lot of other things, but we put that all in place ahead of time.

When it came to the actual moving day, my brother and I made sure that we had Mum’s rooms all set up. Her pictures were all hung up on the walls. All of her incidental knick-knacks and things were up and around for her. So when she walked through the door into her new suite, there were things set up there that were familiar to her. She felt far more comfortable because it was all her own stuff, and she knew that it was all her own things, her own sofa, her own TV, and pictures of my dad around, that sort of thing. So that made the move much easier physically. Because we did it in stages, it was manageable, but for her, emotionally and mentally, having it set up so she could just walk in the door and sit down, as opposed to bringing her in and then trying to jostle around her with boxes, made all the difference.

Arbourside made sure the manager, assistant manager, the head of housekeeping, dining room staff, and the front desk staff all got to know my mom right away. They introduced themselves to her. They made sure that they had her name correct. They spoke to her in a very welcoming manner, as if she had been there forever. They repeatedly told her they were so happy to have her join the Arbourside community and family. She is thriving. She’s pushing 102, and she’s only just started into a little bit of repeating herself in probably the last six months or so. She’s done really well.

COVID lockdown was so hard on everyone, but it was especially hard on seniors to not be able to go downstairs and socialize. Even so, Arbourside were stellar during that. I was so thrilled with the way that they conducted everything. It was such a load off of me to know that my mom was safe. Tanya, the manager, literally said to me, “You don’t need to worry about your mom. We’ve got her. We’re going to take care of her. We’re going to make sure she’s safe.” It was just amazing.

I would have made the decision to move my mom years before, hands down, bar none. I don’t even have to think about the answer to that one. I really dragged my feet because my mom and dad had bought a townhouse only two blocks away from me. My mom and dad both absolutely loved where they lived at Chelsea Gardens. Then my dad passed away, it’s been 14 years now, but my mom really didn’t want to go anywhere. She used to tell me that she was not leaving, that the only way she was ever going to leave there was going to be feet first in a box because she felt that that’s where Dad was. She was happy there because Dad had been so happy there, and so she didn’t feel like she could leave that. It was really a struggle because she’s a very strong Newfie from Newfoundland, and she dug her heels in and said, “I’m not going anywhere.”

I dragged my heels because I love my mother, so I wanted to try to make her as happy and comfortable as I could. But when I got to the point where I couldn’t keep her happy, that she was really starting to decline, which I knew wasn’t dementia, it was a decline in her zest for life, and my zest for life was being tamped down also, it got to be far too much for me. I finally had a little bit of a breakdown one day, and I thought, "This is it, I can’t do this anymore. I have to find somewhere for her to go."

So we found Arbourside Court, and it has been so fabulous. The weight off of me, knowing that my mother is so well cared for, even though it’s not a care facility, but she is so well cared for, and she’s so happy being there, that’s the only thing I could say, that I wish that I had done it at least two years earlier than I did.

Because I’m in my 60s, most of my friends’ parents are in their eighties and nineties, and they’re going through the same thing. I’m talking with them, and they’re saying, "Dad’s saying he’s not moving." Or "Mom’s saying she’s not moving. I don’t know what to do." I’d just do it. You just have to do it. You won’t believe the change in your parent, in your loved one, once you finally get them moved into somewhere like Arbourside. And then the relief and the stress that is taken off of the loved one who’s the caregiver is enormous.