Start here: the reads in the order the night goes

Every page on this desk answers one question a daughter types into her phone when her mother has started falling, usually on the walk from bed to bathroom. You do not need all of them tonight. Find the step that matches where you are, read that, and come back for the next one when you have slept. Nothing here is medical advice, and anything about her health or her medicines belongs with her doctor or pharmacist.

1. She is on the floor, or was an hour ago

   Start with the first ten minutes after a fall. It covers the 911 decision, why she is never pulled up by the arms, how she rises in stages if she is not hurt, and the six details to write down. If her head hit anything, read she hit her head but says she is fine before you do anything else. If someone was found in the morning after a night on the floor, couldn't get up until morning is the page, and it applies to mothers too.

2. She is back in bed, and you are awake

   What you do tonight, in this order is short on purpose: lights, the route, shoes, the phone, sitting before standing, and who is in the house for the rest of the night.

3. The morning phone call to her doctor

   A fall only helps her care if it reaches the appointment as a fact. Three falls this month gives you the sentence to say and the CDC self-check she can fill in while you wait. If you are trying to understand what repeated falls mean, what it means, and what it does not turns the public cause list into questions for her doctor, and is it normal to fall a lot separates common from ignorable.

4. Why the nights, and the walk itself

   Why she falls more at night walks the route stop by stop. She fell getting up to go to the bathroom is about stop two, the edge of the bed. Keeping her from falling out of bed covers the difference between rolling off and standing up, and why this desk will not guess about bed rails.

5. The decision: can she be alone at night?

   The worksheet asks eight yes-or-no questions and tells you what each answer points toward, without a score. How many falls before in-home care explains why no public source names a number, and what decides it instead.

6. If the answer is no

   How an overnight caregiver works covers awake versus sleeping overnight, what a shift looks like from evening to morning, what a non-medical caregiver does not do, and why Medicare does not pay for it.

7. One Saturday, and the drawer

   Night lights and grab bars turns the CDC checklist into a shopping list and an afternoon. Then the devices: a fall alert button when she lives alone, when the pendant stays in a drawer, and what a bed alarm can and cannot tell you.

8. The numbers to put on the fridge

   West county numbers explains who does a home safety check and why the fire district lines are daytime questions, not emergencies. The local help directory lists every line with the page it was read from.

If you only read two pages

Read the first ten minutes, then the worksheet. The first keeps the next fall from getting worse. The second tells you whether the next fall should happen with somebody already in the house.

How this desk is built

Each fact links to the public page it came from, in the sentence where it is used, and the sources page lists them all with the date each was checked. How we write explains the method, the one paid placement and what this site will not do.