The Arizona Summer Heat is not Plant Friendly

Come in from the heat and tour our homes! Reach out to us @aparadiseforparentsassistedliving, our website, email or call us at 623-295-9890.

Time to Party

Come party with us! Reach out to us via Facebook (@aparadiseforparentsassistedliving), our website, email, or call 623-295-9890. Thanks!

Scams We have heard about in our assisted living homes

Do you know of any scams targeting seniors? Please let us know. Reach out to us through Facebook (@aparadiseforparentsassistedliving), our website, email us, or call 623-295-9890.

This is the most full we've ever been..

What a fun surprise to have this surprise birthday party in where else..? Our house in...Surprise! Come meet these wonderful caregivers. Reach out to us through Facebook (@aparadiseforparentsassistedliving), our website, email or call us at 623-295-9890.

Time to Check the Medications

When we take the time to backup each other, we can make sure we are providing our residents with exceptional service. We would like to show you all the things we do to provide the best care we can. Just reach out to us through Facebook (@aparadiseforparentsassistedliving), our website, email or call us at 623-295-9890

6 Delicious Senior Meal Delivery Services Near Surprise and Goodyear

As we age our ability to get around decreases. Many elderly people find it more and more difficult to make food in their home or ear out in a restaurant. That’s where senior meal delivery businesses come in. We are blessed in the Surprise and Goodyear, Arizona area to have a wide choice of senior meal deliver services.

Senior meal delivery businesses can bring delicious and nutritious meals right to a senior’s home. They come ready to eat. All the customer has to do is sit down and enjoy them. In this blog post we thought we would list out some of our favorite meal delivery services. Some of them are local to the Surprise and Goodyear area. Others are nationwide. We hope it helps you or someone in your family.
Senior Meal Delivery Services – The List

This list isn’t in any particular order. All services will provide an excellent choice of food at very reasonable prices.

Something Special Meals

These guys recently started out as a small family-run business in the Phoenix area. Their family has over 28 years in the food catering business however. They knew what they were doing. Over time they have grown Something Special into a solid business in Phoenix.

Although their website shows that they concentrate a lot of school lunches and corporate lunches, they also do senior meal delivery to people’s homes. They believe in high-quality, eco-friendly meals.

They are located in Cave Creek, Arizona. However, they can deliver all over the Phoenix Valley. You can see a list of towns where they deliver here. Currently they deliver to Goodyear but not Surprise. The delivery charge is only $10. If you are a regular customer and you order more than $100 from them at a time, they may waive the delivery fee. They normally deliver to people’s homes on Wednesdays from 6-9pm and Sundays 12-4PM or 4-8PM.

For senior home delivery, they can provide both individual and family style dinners. They can also deliver meal packages of several meals at once. All their food is organic or grass-fed. If you would like to set up a consultation with them, you can email them or call 480-600-1521. Here is their menu for senior meal delivery.

Meals On Wheels America Senior Meal Delivery Service

Most of you have probably heard about Meals on Wheels. It’s a wonderful charitable service that makes sure lower-income seniors don’t go hungry. The senior meal delivery service is run by thousands of volunteer groups and non-profit agencies across the country.

Homebound seniors receive the highest priority for this program. There are restrictions in some areas. The senior has to be unable to prepare their own meals. Sometimes the requirements include certain medical conditions, mental impairments, or physical disabilities.

When Meals on Wheels delivers to a home, they also do a safety inspection of the home and check the senior for any changes in their health. That way they may be able to identify medical problems before they become more serious.

To find a provider near you, just go to this page on their website and put in your zip code. They will give you the contact information.

Unfortunately, the demand for these services are great and the resources are limited. If you would like to donate to this great cause, you can do so here. If you can’t donate money, you can also volunteer your time.

My Errand Ally



My Errand Ally is very aptly named. They are an errand-running service for people who don’t have the time or the inclination to do it themselves. Located in Chandler Arizona, they serve all of Maricopa County and Tucson. Although they are not specifically a senior meal delivery service, they can deliver fresh groceries to a senior’s home. They can also help pick up prescriptions or any other day-to-day items a senior might need.

They also offer the Electronic Caregiver services that will monitor the senior in their home. By keeping track of vital signs and a give them a way to notify someone if there is a problem, the senior has a better chance of living at home longer.

In addition, if the senior is going out of town, they can watch the senior’s home while they are away, bring in the mail or put out the trash. That can give a senior a good piece of mind while they are visiting the grandchildren.

You can reach My Errand Ally through their website or give them a call at 602-499-5042.

Sunfare

Located in both Phoenix and Los Angeles, Sunfare prepares and delivers personalized healthy meals to homes. They are not only a senior meal delivery service. The company wants to deliver meals to all sorts of people. The meals are part of plans to help people lose weight and become healthy.

They have both weekly and monthly programs depending on the needs of their customers. Although they have several programs, they will make custom adjustments depending on the tastes of the person who is ordering. Some examples of the meal programs they sell are:
Signature Diet – Diet-focused specializing in customization and great variety
Paleo Program
Fat Burn
Optimal Cleanse
Family Dinners

They rotate the meals over a month or more, so you have a very large variety. Each day’s meals are packaged up in a cooler to stay fresh. They are delivered to a person’s door by 7am each morning. All your loved one will have to do is heat them up when ready.



You can reach out to them through their contact page on their website, or call them at 866-786-3273.

Meals of Joy Senior Home Delivery

Started in 2014, Meals of Joy is a non-profit located near our assisted living home in Goodyear, Arizona. They are a non-profit organization in the Southwest Phoenix area committed to helping seniors who can’t make meals on their own.

Meals of Joy delivers meals to Buckeye, Estrella, Goodyear and Litchfield Park. The company believes in bringing the kinds of meals to seniors that they remember from Sunday dinners growing up.

Fees for this senior meal delivery service are based on the senior’s ability to pay. They just want to make sure no senior goes hungry in their area.
Martha’s Senior Gourmet

Serving many cities in California and now in Phoenix, Martha’s Senior Gourmet provides a gourmet senior meal delivery service. They tailor their meals to the nutrition needs of seniors. Their meal plans can accommodate special diets such as:
Diabetic
Renal
Low Potassium
Low Sodium
Pureed foods
Gluten sensitive
Vitamin K restrictive
Congestive heart failure

And other diets. They can deliver all meals of the day or just dinner. They even have a dessert menu. You can also sign up for ‘Martha’s Monitoring Service’. With this service, the delivery driver will provide a report on how the senior is doing. They will note any apparent changes in the person health to see if they can do anything to help. This service is free of charge with the meal deliveries. You just have to sign up for it.

We hope this helps you find a good senior meal delivery service around Phoenix. Our first priority is to help seniors live in their homes for the rest of their lives. If for some reason that becomes too difficult, we hope you consider one of our assisted living homes in Goodyear or Surprise Arizona. Feel free to check out our homes in Surprise:
Banff Lane
164th Lane
135th Drive

or our home in Goodyear. We wish you the best of luck. If we can help in any way, please let us know.

Making Friends...

We'd love to include you as a friend. Feel free to reach out to us on Facebook (@aparadiseforparentsassistedliving), our website, email or call 623-295-9890

How to Fight Clostridium Difficile (C. Diff)

There’s a big bad bug running around the United States. It’s called Clostridium Difficile. People call it “C Diff” for short. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), C Diff infections caused over half a million infections in the United States in 2015. What is particularly worrisome is that 100,000 of those cases occurred in nursing homes.

Of those cases, approximately 29,000 patients died within a month of the diagnosis. 15,000 of those 29,000 deaths were directly attributable to the C Diff infection.

C Diff is a bacterium found in many people’s intestines. Normally it is held at bay by healthy gut bacteria. However, when antibiotics for another condition wipe out the good gut bacteria, the C Diff can grow. Left unchecked, C. Diff will cause lots of problems.

People with C Diff infections will have watery (and smelly) diarrhea, fever, loss of appetite, nausea, and abdominal pain. It is much more common among the elderly who already have a compromised immune system.

Once people have C Diff infections, they can release spores into the air through a bowel movement. The spores are very contagious. They can infect other people in the area very quickly.
Solutions to C Diff Infections

When someone starts having diarrhea, doctors will often suspect C. Diff. If you don’t have diarrhea, you can be pretty sure you don’t have C Diff. The doctor will normally take a sample of your stool and run it through several lab tests.

In rare cases they might also want to examine your colon with a colonoscopy. They are looking for:

• Inflammation
• Thickening of colon wall
• Expansion of the bowel or more rarely,
• A hole or perforation in the colon

The first step in the treatment of C Diff infections is (kind of obvious) to stop taking the antibiotic that caused the infection. Then the doctor will, if you can believe it, prescribe another antibiotic that will kill off the C. Diff bacteria. Normally they will prescribe one of three medications:

1. Vancomycin
2. Fidaxomicin or (in rare cases)
3. Metronidazole

People with severe cases of C Diff infections may have other conditions including severe pain, organ failure, toxic megacolon or inflammation of the lining of the abdominal wall. In these cases, the doctor may need to do surgery to remove the infected part of the colon.
Recurrent C Diff

People with the following conditions are more prone to have to deal with C Diff infections on multiple occasions:

• Elderly with a weakened immune system
• Taking antibiotics for another condition while taking C. Diff antibiotics
• Have another serious medical disorder with the kidneys, liver or bowel

To help people with multiple bouts of C Diff, the doctor will start with more antibiotics. Then they may move to a procedure called Fecal Microbiota Transplant or FMT. Yes it is what you think it is. A doctor will take a stool sample from a healthy individual and transplant it into the infected person’s colon. They will use either a colonoscope or nasogastric tube. The idea is to introduce healthy bacteria back into the unhealthy gut to contain the C Diff bacteria.



Although it’s still an experimental procedure, FMT enjoys about an 85% success rate when tried one or more times.

Along the lines of restoring healthy bacteria into a sick person’s gut, doctors may also recommend the patient take a probiotic. The sooner those healthy bacteria move back in, the sooner they can control the C Diff.

Here’s also an alternative way to potentially cure your C Diff infections:

Preventing C. Diff Infections

By now it should be obvious that staying healthy and keeping your immune system intact is the best way to prevent C Diff infections. Most of the time if you’re not using antibiotics, you probably won’t experience an infection.

Recently C Diff infections have been found more and more outside of hospitals and nursing homes. It seems to be spreading into communities. Investigators have found up to 42% of meat products contain C Diff. Many farm animals have the bacterium in their gut. They can pass it along to humans through eating the meat.


The trouble with C Diff is that cooking doesn’t kill it. You can cook chicken for 2 hours and still not kill the bacteria. Neither does alcohol-based sanitizers. That’s why it’s advisable to use gloves when handling raw meat.

Studies are also showing that C Diff thrives on the standard, sugar-rich diet that many Americans eat. Scientists have known for a long time that sugar can have an adverse affect on your immune system. But now it looks like bacteria like C Diff are evolving to use sugar as fuel.

If you have an elderly loved one in your family that has a big sweet tooth, you may want to help them recover from their addiction. We wrote another blog post on how to lessen or even eliminate those sugar cravings.

Anything you can do to improve your immune system and gut health will lessen the chances of contracting C. Diff. There are articles all over the internet that describe foods that are packed with antioxidants and immune system boosters.
C Diff and Assisted Living Homes

C Diff really hits home for us. There is a large retiree population around Goodyear and Surprise. They are prime candidates for the infection.

We just had a C Diff scare in our assisted living home in Goodyear, Arizona. One of our residents returned from the hospital with a large amount of antibiotics. Then we noticed the resident had a lot of diarrhea. Some of the other residents quickly started showing signs as well.

Our well-trained staff took immediate action. They worked with one of our mobile doctors to take diarrhea samples back to the lab. Then they quarantined the house and cleaned all the surfaces they could with a bleach solution. Everyone donned gowns and masks to avoid breathing in the spores.

Fortunately, the lab tests came back negative. Our doctor attributed the diarrhea to some Chinese food one of our resident’s families brought to everyone the night before. We were glad it wasn’t C Diff, but we are remaining vigilant. With the rate of increase of this infection, you can never be too sure.

We're still full, but....

When I wrote this latest update to our availability, we were still full. Since then one of our families has decided to place their loved in another home closer to them. So if you know anyone who would like to have a male roommate, please reach out to us. You can reach us through Facebook (@aparadiseforparentsassistedliving), our website, email or call 623-295-9890. Thanks!

New Nametags for our Caregivers

It's just easier for the families of our residents when our caregivers wear nametags. We just ordered new ones for our employees. If you want to come out and meet the caregivers, just reach out to us through Facebook (@aparadiseforparentsassistedliving) our website, email or call us at 623-295-9890.

Music can make all the difference

Check out what effect a simple song can have on our residents. Would you like to join in the singing? Just reach out to us through Facebook (@aparadiseforparentsassistedliving), our website, email or call us at 623-295-9890

It's Puzzle Time

Our caregivers and residents have fun solving challenging problems and playing games together. Please come and check it out. Reach out to us on Facebook (@aparadiseforparentsassistedliving), our website, email or call us at 623-295-9890

As of August 12th, We're Still Full...

We love having several generations of families visiting our homes. Care to join us? Just reach out through Facebook (@aparadiseforparentsassistedliving), our website, email or call us at 623-295-9890.

Our Caregivers Do Great Birthday Parties

We'd love to have you come for one of our celebrations. Just reach out to us through Facebook (@aparadiseforparentsassistedliving), our website, email or call us at 623-295-9890.

Hugging is what we do!

Need a hug? We give them out for free. Feel free to reach out to us via Facebook (@aparadiseforparentsassistedliving), our website, email or call us at 623-295-9890

Our Partnership with Hospice of the West

Hospice of the West does a great job working with our families during a very traumatic time. We wanted to give them a shout out for all they do. If you need Hospice services, please reach out to us. We can put you in touch with these wonderful ladies. Just contact us through Facebook (@aparadiseforparentsassistedliving), our website, our email or call us at 623-295-9890

Assisted Living Music Video Parody (Lyrics)

We made our first assisted living music video. Three of our homes (the ones on Banff Lane and 135th Drive in Surprise and Campbell Avenue in Goodyear) participated in making the video. Everyone had a great time. Our video production company – Voyage Pro Productions – did an outstanding job.

Assisted Living Music for a Cause

We tried to use the video to raise money to help treat our residents who have Alzheimer’s. If you like the video, it would be great if you would donate. Even if you could like and share the video, we would really appreciate it. We’ll try to make some more. If nothing else, our residents really liked making the assisted living music videos.

So without further ado, here are the lyrics for our first official assisted living music video..

Assisted Living Rhapsody

Is this my rehab?

Is this just my bum knee?

Caught in a taxicab

No escape from my family

Open your eyes

Look all around Surprise and see

I’m just an old boy, I need some Vitamin C

Because I got the runs, need to go

(Blood) Pressure’s high, Iron’s low

Anyone win bingo? doesn’t really matter to me, to me

Mama, just had a scan

I laid down in a bed

Results came back, and I’m not dead

Mama, we have tons of fun

At the assisted living where I stay

Mama, oh, oh

For Hospice I qualify

If I forget your name again tomorrow

Carry on, carry on, as if nothing really matters

Too late, my bedtime has come

In my chair I will recline

Dentures soaking all the time

Goodbye everybody, I’ve got to sew,

I sure could sew so much more in my youth

Mama, oh, oh (Can I win at bingo?)

I’m not really shy

Sometimes I don’t wear any clothes at all

I see them cooking an omeletto in a pan

Chocolate Moose, Chocolate moose with a side of fresh mango

Thunderbolt and lightening, very, very frightening me

Lisinopril, Lisinopril, Lisinopril, Lisinopril, Lisinopril, Seroquel, So many pills

I’m just an old boy and somebody bathes me,

He’s just an old boy with a large family,

Spare him the move to a big facility

Nurses come nurses go can I watch the show?
This pill-a, no you cannot watch the show, watch the show
This pill-a, you cannot watch the show, watch the show
This pill-a, you cannot watch the show, watch the show

(cannot watch the show) watch the show (off to bed you go) watch the show (Doctor told us so)

Oh oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no
Oh mama mia, mama mia, mama mia watch the show

The cooler tub never has a beer for me for me for me

So will you walk me and share with me some pie

So you think you can dress me and tie my tie?

Oh babies, can’t wait to see grand babies

Just gotta get it out just gotta get it right out of my ear

Oh oh oh yeah, oh oh yeah
My family really matters
Anyone can see
My family really matters
My family really matters to me
Anyone win at bingo?

Come Join Us for the Next One

We are starting to brainstorm the next video. We may need some extras. Would you like to join us? Please reach out to us to see what we can do.

We're Totally Full, but would still like to help..

If we can answer any questions or talk to you about other homes, feel free to reach out to us. You can reach us through our website, email or call us at 623-295-9890.

Our Bible Study Program is Alive and Well

Please come join us. Just reach out to us @aparadiseforparentsassistedliving on Facebook, our website, our email or call us at 623-295-9890.

Nurses are Among our Favorite People

We work with a lot of nurses - and they are so wonderful!. Come meet some of them. Please contact us through our website, email or call us at 623-295-9890