What Do You Do When Mom Falls at 2 a.m.?
You’re jolted awake by a phone call no caregiver wants. “Your mom fell.” Your heart pounds. You panic. Is she okay? Did she break a hip? How long was she on the floor?
If you’ve ever faced that moment — whether from a late-night call or finding your loved one on the floor yourself — you know the rush of fear. And likely, the guilt that follows. Why wasn’t I there? Could I have prevented this?
I’ve been there too.
Let’s walk through what you can do next — not just to respond with calm and confidence, but to prepare for the future.
Know the Two Types of Falls
Not every fall is the same. And your response shouldn’t be either.
Medical Emergency Falls:
These are serious: broken bones, bleeding, unconsciousness, or severe pain. Call 911 immediately. Don’t wait. Don’t second-guess.Non-Injury, Cognitive-Driven Falls:
More common in dementia. No visible injury, but your loved one can’t get up alone. This isn’t about balance — it’s about brain processing. They may misjudge distance or forget a step. These are the falls we focus on today.
In these moments, panic isn’t helpful. Presence is.
A Fall Isn’t the End. It’s Data.
A fall does not mean you failed.
Healthy adults fall. Children fall. People with dementia fall. It’s part of life. A fall is not a reflection of your love or diligence. It’s a signal to reassess.
Ask:
Is it time to request a bedside commode?
Do we need a transport wheelchair for outings?
Should I talk to hospice about more support?
When you see a fall as data, not disaster, you can steward the moment instead of spinning in guilt.
Emotional First Aid Comes First
Your mindset matters more than you think. That’s why the PEACE Framework™ starts with you, the caregiver.
Before you act:
Breathe in deeply. Then out.
Pray quietly: “Lord, guide me right now.”
Check for injury. Stay steady.
If you bring panic into the room, your loved one will feel it.
If you bring peace, they will follow your lead.
Use This as a Stewardship Check
After the fall, assess how you’re stewarding this season. Ask yourself:
1. Skills:
Do I know how to help them up safely?
Should I schedule a mobility assessment?
2. Resources:
Do we need more equipment (walker, wheelchair, commode)?
Are cameras or monitoring tools in place for safety?
3. Self-Care:
Am I sleeping enough to stay calm in crises?
Do I need support during nighttime hours?
Galatians 6:2 reminds us: “Bear one another’s burdens.” That includes preparing for these burdens wisely and with grace.
You Are Not Alone — And God Is Not Surprised
Isaiah 46:4 gives us this promise: “Even to your old age I will be the same, and even to your graying years I will carry you.”
That includes your loved one. That includes you.
The Lord knew this moment was coming. And He is already there, carrying you through it.
Let Me Walk With You Through the Next Crisis
If this touched a nerve, join us for our next Ask the Dementia Coach session:
Saturday, August 23rd at 12 PM ET
Live coaching. Practical solutions. Biblical clarity.
Bring your toughest questions. Walk away with calm, peace, and a plan.
Let’s stop reacting and start stewarding — together.
Transcript
The Night That Changed Everything
It’s 2 a.m. The phone rings, and your heart stops. You hear the words you’ve been dreading. Your mom fell. In that split second, your mind floods with panic. Is she hurt? Did she break a hip? And how long has she been on the floor? If you’ve ever been jolted awake by that kind of news or found your loved one on the floor yourself, you know that helpless, sick-to-your-stomach feeling. And if you’re honest, you also know the guilt that creeps in right after. Why wasn’t I there? Could I have prevented this? The truth is, balls are going to heaven, even when you do everything right and the problem is right in that moment your brain doesn’t want to think clearly you want to help you need to help but you don’t always know the safest next step for them or for you.
And that’s what we’re going to unpack today. How not to panic when your loved one inevitably falls. And how to turn what feels like a crisis into a moment of calm and wise action. Hey Christian Care Companion, welcome to Dementia Caregiver Support for Christians. I’m your host, Lizette Klute, and I have been where you are. In the middle of the night, in the middle of the mess, And I know that caring for someone with dementia isn’t just about what you do. It is about how you think and how you respond and prepare your heart to act with wisdom instead of fear. I equip overwhelmed Christian caregivers just like you to make the right decisions while navigating your dementia care journey.
And sometimes overwhelmed Christian caregivers like my client that we’re going to talk about today hire me to come alongside them and help them carry the weight of those decisions so that they can stop second-guessing themselves and start feeling confident that they are doing their best. Now, before we dive in, I want to invite you to something that can make a huge difference for you. On Saturday, August the 23rd at 12 p.m. Eastern, I’m hosting our next monthly Ask the Dementia Coach question and answer session. This is not a casual chat. It is a guided coaching experience where you can bring your hardest dementia care questions and get biblically grounded and practical solutions that fit your specific situation. You do not have to figure it out alone. You can get clarity and peace before the next crisis hits.
Responding with Calm and Confidence
You can save your seat right now at thinkdifferentdementia.com forward slash ask. All right, now let’s talk about how you can respond with calm, with skill, and with confidence the next time your loved one with dementia falls and why your reaction in those first moments matter more than you think.
So let me tell you a story about a recent phone call that I received, actually just this week, which prompted me to do this episode. One of my coaching clients in my group coaching program texted me early in the morning and needed me to give her a call. When I called her back, She told me that her mom had fallen in the middle of the night, and she was upset because she struggled and she didn’t know how to get her up off of the ground and felt tremendous guilt about knowing that her mom had been on the floor. She has cameras in the house, and so she looked at the cameras, and we figured out her mom had been on the floor for about six hours. And we talked about her feelings of being helpless and afraid and all of the what-ifs that could have happened and so I’m started to think about her experience and I know that a lot of the solo reflective episodes we’ve been doing have not been as practical related to some of the day-to-day things, but this really prompted me to stop and redo and do another episode on fall prevention.
Psalm 46 verses 1 through 3 says, God is our refuge and our strength, a very ready help in trouble.
Therefore, we will not fear, though the earth shakes and the mountains slip into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains quake at its swelling pride. Remember, God is our refuge and our strength, and a very ready help in trouble. So, if you have been a caregiver for more than about five minutes, you know it is not if a fall is going to happen but when, But the thing is, how you respond in those first few moments can shape everything that happens next. So we’re going to look at this today in four different points. The first one is there are two types of falls, and the difference between them absolutely make a difference. The second thing is falls are a normal part of the journey and are not the end of the story.
Understanding Types of Falls
Thirdly, emotional first aid comes before physical first aid. And fourthly, we’re going to look at using the fall, the person’s falling on the ground, as a way to check your stewardship.
So there are two types of falls. The first thing, there are two types of falls. The first one is the medical emergency. That is the obvious injury, a deformed bone, severe pain, bleeding, an inability to move, somebody unconscious on the floor. That is obvious. That is a do not pass go. Do not collect 200 is what I always used to tell my patients. All you do is call 911 immediately, right? That is the medical emergency. You walk in. The person’s on the ground. They’re unresponsive, and you can see that they got hurt. Call 911. Don’t panic. Just call 911. The second type of injury is the fall that is the, my dignity got hurt. Like you or I walking out in the community, and we end up on the ground. We trip. We fall. We step into a hole, whatever. There is no visible injury, but the person cannot get up.
From the ground without help. Yes, it is serious, but they’re on the ground and they’re not going anywhere but on the ground. We have time. This is the type of fall that we are going to talk about today because when we immediately walk in and we see that, we assess what’s going on, right? You can look and see there’s blood on the ground, they’re responsive, whatever. And so when my client walked into her mom’s room, her mom was sitting on the floor.
She had had an accident. There was, you know, lots of things going on, but she was just calmly sitting on the floor in her bedroom and she couldn’t get up. And so I want you to make sure that when these types of falls happen, we know and understand that these types of falls are likely caused by their cognitive changes, not necessarily a balance problem. I’ll never forget, I used to work in the hospitals, and one of the doctors one day, I went up to the doctor and I said to him, this person is a high fall risk. And he looked at me like I’d grown ahead. And he said, but he doesn’t have any balance problems. Well, this gentleman had pretty advanced dementia. And I looked at him, I said, no, it’s not his balance, it’s his thinking. And he looked at me like.
I had lost my head, and I said to him, I’m like, this man cannot judge distance, he cannot judge depth, so he walks up to a couch, a bed, a toilet.
Something, and thinking that he’s close enough to sit down, and he makes a judgment and error, and he ends up on the floor. And it was like the doctor truly did not understand and all of a lot of our emphasis on fall prevention has to do with strength and balance and those things are good and great and needed and necessary but if a person cannot think and they make poor decisions they are likely going to fall. So for example, most of us have been around toddlers, right? They take risks and they do stupid things. That is what I’m talking about. They misjudge distance. They misjudge whether something is locked or is going to swivel. And because of being impulsive or confused, especially at night, they make bad decisions. And the type of fall that, yes, these things can result in the serious fall. But what I want to remind you is that the Lord is still in this. And even though we want to put this person in bubble wrap, we want to keep them protected.
And yes, I’m not suggesting that we help them to fall, but we have to recognize that this is going to likely happen. And if it does, it is a part of God’s providence.
In this specific situation, even these unexpected things, I can tell you one day I was standing right with my mom, My background is an occupational therapist. And literally, she turned and she went down like a tree. And her head missed a corner of a cabinet in their house by a couple of inches. And I literally just stood there. There was nothing I could do to prevent her from falling. I was within hand’s reach. I could not stop her from falling. And so recognizing that, you know, there are two types of falls. One is the medical emergency and the second is the non-medical or non-injury
Falls Are Part of the Journey
fall brings us right into the second point. A fall is a part of the journey and is not necessarily the end of the story.
Yes, if it is a medical emergency, this could change the person’s quality of life and the quantity of life, which is exactly why the medical model quite rightfully says we need to try to prevent falls. But the reality is that falls are going to happen. If you walk on two feet, you were going to fall at some point or another. I’ll never forget when we moved into our house in Greenwood, I was so super embarrassed, right? I detest spiders. You guys might have heard me tell this story before. I totally hate spiders. And I was picking up some boxes and I was walking to the trash can and there was in, we live in South Carolina and there are these beautiful big orb spiders.
And there was one that was living in a bunch of boxes close to where these boxes were because we were moving. And as I picked up the boxes, I was about halfway to the curb with the boxes when my brain said spider. And I started looking, looking, where’s the spider? And I stopped actually looking to where I was walking. And the next minute, I was on the ground. My butt was on the ground. And so falls, if you are walking, if you are a human who is on their feet at some point or another, you are going to fall. Normal healthy adults fall. But people with cognitive decline also fall. So, this particular client, her mom is on hospice and she has end-stage dementia. And often, these kinds of falls can mark a change in either mobility-related things or cognition and is not, dear listener, because you, as the caregiver, have failed. So some practical tips for you to think about is we do want to.
Prevent injury. We do want to prevent a person from falling, but we also want to mitigate the effects of a fall if possible. So for example, in this client’s specific situation, some of my thoughts to her included, let us ask hospice for a bedside commode, put it next to her bed so that she can see it.
That we make sure that you have all of the incontinence supplies. We started to talk about the fact that she is now so unstable on her feet. So when we go into the community, she is more likely to be at risk for falls and that maybe we should have a transportation wheelchair for community mobility. And then I had a client many years ago, one of the solutions we came up with was we put a mattress right next to the bed because her mom consistently got herself onto the floor and crawled. So God is in control, even of these unexpected things. And it’s our job, though, to prepare and see as much as possible whether we can protect their dignity, but we do know and recognize people living with dementia are going to fall. Isaiah 46, 3-4 says, Listen to me, O house of Jacob, and all the remnants of the house of Israel, you who have been carried by me from birth and have been carried from the womb, even to your old age, I will be the same. The Lord will be the same.
And even to your graying years, I will carry you. I have done it, and I will bear you. I will carry you, and I will save you. So, My encouragement to you as a Christian caregiver is know and understand, even in that fall, the Lord is carrying you as well as your loved one, and it will be okay because we do not live.
In only the here and now. We live with the hope of eternity. So let that be an encouragement. to you today.
Emotional First Aid First
The third thing that we’re going to look at is emotional first aid comes before physical first aid. Remember, and this is a hard thing, one of the strategies that I teach people in my caregiving communities is I call it the PEACE framework. It stands for person, environment, activity participation and caregiver contribution, and then we educate around that. When you as the caregiver come in and immediately you freak out, immediately you are afraid, immediately you are anxious, it likely will contribute to increasing your person’s anxiety, confusion, or resistance. So something that immediately you walk in, analyze and see what’s going on. If there’s no obvious injury, take a deep breath.
In and out. And just pause, center yourself as best you can, and send up a quick little prayer.
And then say, then be in a controlled situation.
So you have to keep yourself under control. I know this is not related to a fall, but thinking through the consequences of things can emotionally prepare you before something happens.
In February, my mom passed away. And for years in our life, we had been joking because my mom never, ever, ever wanted CPR. She did not want to be on a vent. She did not want to be kept alive. she was ready to to pass away and you know so our running family joke was that we would trip over the the you know we would pull the plug we would trip over the tube uh we’re from south africa so we have a very gallows humor and it was never done in a disrespectful fashion it was always just a part of the our journey in preparing me and so when they called my mom’s code i had already thought through my response. And so my immediate response that day was I popped my bottom to the edge of the chair in the waiting room and started praying, Lord, she’s tired. She doesn’t want to live like this. Take her. If it’s her time, take her. And so when you come up on a person who is on the floor who has fallen, I know that that is the immediate response that you’re going to have.
And so when you stop and think through these things ahead of time and prepare yourself to, beforehand, it will keep you from panicking and will allow you to make better and safer decisions. 2 Corinthians 4.16-18 says, Therefore, we do not lose heart, but though our outer person is decaying, yet our inner person is being renewed day by day. For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison. While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things that are seen are temporary, but the things that are not seen are eternal. So yes, I want you to pause when something happens.
And yes, there may be the type of fall that resulted in a fracture that may change the person’s last years or time of their life. That is not what we are talking about today specifically. It’s just I want you to remember that these kinds of things have already been predetermined, and the Lord already knew it was going to happen.
Checking Your Caregiving Stewardship
And even though it surprised us, it did not surprise the Lord. And so the last thing that we’re going to look at is how to use this specific fall to check your stewardship of your journey. A process that I take my clients through includes five different phases of which one.
Which happens primarily in the opportunities to work with me. In one, it is our stewardship phase. And that is where we actually integrate three different things. Your skills, the actual skills that you have for caregiving, your resources, as well as stewarding yourself. And so after every fall, I want you to ask yourself questions about your skills, about your resources, and how you are stewarding yourself. So the first thing is, do I know how to actually safely get them up off of the ground? Do I maybe need more mobility aids, or is it time for a tune-up therapy session? Under the resources ask yourself do i have the right equipment do we need a walker a bedside commode a wheelchair do we have enough people human resources during the times that we need it do we need some technological resources like cameras and then stewardship of yourself am i resting enough so that I respond well? Do I have a plan to keep my own emotions in control during an emergency?
And then Galatians 6 verse 2 says, bear one another’s burden.
Burdens, and therefore fulfill the law of Christ. And then I want you to remember what our only comfort is in life and death, and that is that you belong, body and soul, in life and in death, and in falling, to your faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. And because of that.
It can shape how you respond to emergencies. So to recap real quick, there are four things that we looked at. The first one, there are two types of falls. The second one, falls are a part of the journey and it’s not necessarily the end of the story. It is a part of the story. The third thing is emotional first aid comes before physical first aid. If you can control your emotions, it will significantly help the situation. The fourth thing is use a specific fall to look at how you were stewarding your whole journey. I want you to remember a fall is just data. It is not a reflection on your caregiving. It is not a condemnation on your skills.
Your person is not less dignified because they have fallen, and your worth as a caregiver is not in preventing every single fall. It is not possible. And remember, we serve a God of order. And he has already planned and prepared all of these unexpected moments. They’re unexpected to us, but they’re not unexpected to God. And I want to invite you to go from feeling panicked to really thinking through these adverse type of situations. What are you going to do if somebody falls? What are you going to do if you come into the room and they’re not breathing? What are you going to do in all of these situations?
Preparing for the Unexpected
Think through your responses ahead of time. Because when you do that, you will respond with a plan, with skill, and then have these resources in place and then protect your own well-being through this. So just remember, if you have been shaken by your loved one falling, you are not alone in this.
Join the Coaching Community
And I would love to walk with you to help you in this particular journey. So this next Ask the Dementia Coach is next Saturday. It’s the 23rd of August at 12 p.m. Eastern. And I would love if you have any questions, please sign up for an Ask the Dementia Coach monthly question and answer session. They do become a part of this podcast.
And they help other caregivers, just like you, in practical solutions, but from a Christian worldview. So if you haven’t come to one yet, I invite you to come. They’re typically about two hours long. Most people, when they come, they stay and they get the entire coaching experience that you would get when you join one of the communities that I have. And I have several different levels of communities. So anyway, just an invitation for you to come to the next Ask the Dementia Coach to sign up, go to thinkdifferentdementia.com forward slash ask.
And as I end all of my episodes, I want to remind you that I do pray for you and I want to remind you that the Lord is good and his peace surpasses all understanding. And so if you’re struggling with that peace, reach out. Let me know email me text me go to my website communicate with me i am here for you i’m here for the duration and as i end my episodes may the lord bless you and keep you and i will see you in our next episode.
