My elderly mother keeps accidentally turning on airplane mode, or turning off cellular data or wifi from the control center. I've tried to explain to her how not to do it, but somehow she is still managing. This sometimes causes her to become completely unreachable until she notices and turns them off. This can be dangerous at her age since she's often in the house alone.
Basically, is there a way to just remove this from the control center completely, so she has to go into Settings if she wants to toggle these settings? I wish I knew how/when she's toggling these so I could help her not do so, but just removing them would solve the problem too.
So … as somebody who’s recently had to deal with this … first and foremost, my sympathies.
Forget about the technology. It doesn’t matter.
At all.
Worse, it’s just a waste of your time and energy — and, before you know it, hopefully later rather than sooner but guaranteed before you expect, you’re not going to have enough of either to waste on tech support.
Start by talking with her primary care physician. If your mother is even remotely willing to consider it, get her an appointment with a neurosurgeon.
And, no matter what she says, figure out now (NOW NOW NOW NOW! NOW!! NOW!!!) how you will ensure she is well cared for when she is no longer able to perform the tasks of an independently responsible adult.
For me and my sister, the last straw was this summer. I and my mother live several miles away from each other in Tempe, Arizona — a suburb of Phoenix. We had had a lot of concerns, etc.; this didn’t come out of the blue. But her air conditioner died on what later turned out to be the hottest day of the summer. My sister found out late in the day from a complaint Mom made on Facebook. Mom was going to just turn on a fan and put a wet rag on her head. (Overnight lows were in the upper-90s.) I scrambled to get her checked into a hotel for a couple nights. The next morning I got a call from the hotel front desk that she had already checked herself out and was sitting in the lobby.
Long story cut short … she’s now in the second assisted living facility and fortunately happy in this one. The closing date on her home sale (to pay for all of this) is next week … and, in the process, we discovered that we waited waaaaaaay too long. There was far too much in her home that was definitely “not right,” that wasn’t apparent to either my sister or me in our visits.
Good luck. You need it.
b&
