Helping families face the hardest decision no one prepared them to make.
Waiting feels like love. Acting feels like giving up. Neither is true. Cory Fosco spent thirty-four years inside long-term care as a social worker, admissions director, and healthcare executive. He wrote this book so families can decide with clarity, before a crisis decides for them.
“The Question of When is the best book on long-term care and post-acute placement I have ever read. It gives families the foundation before they need it: the vocabulary and trade-offs that almost nobody understands until a discharge planner is asking for a 72-hour decision.” Phil Fogg, President/CEO, Marquis Companies
Immediate Past Chairman, American Health Care Association
Most families arrive with one of three questions
Nobody researches senior care for fun. If you are here, something happened, or keeps almost happening. Start with the question that brought you.
Is it time?
The signs rarely arrive all at once. What to watch for, and how to tell normal aging from real decline.
Read the signs Question 2.Which kind of care?
Independent living, assisted living, memory care, skilled nursing. What each setting actually provides, and who it fits.
Compare the four settings Question 3.Who pays for it?
What Medicare actually covers, what it does not, and the sources families combine to pay for long-term care.
Understand the costs
Written from inside the room
Waiting feels like love. Acting feels like giving up. Neither is true, but by the time most families learn that, the decision has already been made for them.
Cory sat across the admissions desk from hundreds of families who waited too long, not because they did not care, but because nobody told them what to look for or when to move. This book is the conversation he had with each of them, written down for the adult child watching a parent change, and for the spouse managing alone and wondering how much longer.
In every format a family might need
- Paperback Amazon · Hilarity for Charity bookstore
- Ebook All major retailers
- Audiobook Apple Books · Spotify
- Braille Bookshare, accessible format
- Talking book Available in the National Library Service collection at the Library of Congress.
- Library ebook Available to Illinois library patrons statewide through BiblioBoard’s Indie Illinois collection.
One page that sorts what you are seeing
The Four Signal Categories checklist comes from thirty-four years of watching families work through this decision. It puts the signals in the order that matters, before a crisis sets the order for you.
Get the checklist