The new shiny 2019 thread for anyone caring for elderly parents

Sorry for your loss Oneday.

🤗sending a hug oneday

for you, oneday

oneday I'm very sorry for your loss, how lovely that she passed away at home.

Oneday

hugs to you, I'm sorry for your loss.

in case it's of any use, on the day, in the hours after his death, while I was allowed to sit with him, I thought of dad as having perfect peace now and no more suffering

Oh I'm so sorry

Mum passed this morning. Sitting here now waiting for ooh doc to call back. I'm ok I think just at a bit of a loss for what to do with myself.

We got her home 3 days ago then she gave up - there was always the chance that she would. The DNs have been amazing. There have been some really tough moments but they have held our hands through them and kept mum comfortable and out of pain.

Dh took night shift last night as I hadn't slept since mum had come home. He woke me early this morning and she passed about half an hour after that in her sleep. I've sent dh back up to sleep before dd comes home from dh's ex - she spent day and night there with her half sisters. We'll tell her later.

Thank you so much to everyone here - you have been both therapy and company and the advice I've been given has helped so much.

Cockroach to all

Oh Grace what a lovely story. We have two alpacas and I can vouch for the fact that they are gentle, loving, delightful creatures who are surely designed by Disney.

in case anyone needs a laugh, here is something not related to elderly parents. Maybe we could say "alpaca" instead of "cockroach" - is it just me who never uses that?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-46933720

Dint she never sits down longer than an hour. If we watch a film she will take a break to stretch her legs. Now with bad weather, she is walking indoors for 30 mins each morning and evening. She constantly looks at my Fitbit to see what I've done but doesn't want one herself...however, I actually think me having that motivates her - she sees the "active minutes" thing after I've been running and gets very motivated to move! This is one of the small benefits I think she gets from me being around...that and she's discovered BBC4!!

she does cooking, light dusting, laundry, unloading dishwasher etc. She does go up and down stairs a bit oddly but when dad was in hospital, they told us it's actually okay for the elderly to do that - a sort of sideways thing.

she's 80. I think she's okay, mobility wise, for 80 but everyone's different so I don't really know what to expect. Never knew grandparents.

Grace if she's losing subcutaneous fat, you'll also need to keep an eye on bedsores - she can get those from sitting down too long. Current thinking on cushions is thick wodge of foam with a layer of memory foam on top. And get up once an hour and get the blood flowing back into the bum.

I really don't want to get that old.

We have princess and the pea bed syndrome with DM and it's exactly as Mere says - it's easier to slide out of. But heck, watching her painfully inch her way into it is hard to do

Funny someone should mention junk mail. A crappy catalogue arrived today addressed to DF......he died in 2007.....

sorry I keep double posting

in terms of how depressing it all is....I posted a couple of weeks back about a contact who moved in with elderly parents and seems to be handling all this just fine, in fact is much happier than before.

I have since met a couple of other people also living with elderlies, complete with high bed stories - and they seem to be fine with it. They have factors like the ones I have - gives them a chance to live in a nicer area and do less job work - but they have definitely become more cheerful and accepting of their elderlies in terms of weathering how depressing it is. Perhaps it just takes time. I had to be careful how much I asked them about their experience because I don't know them that well.

Dint I hadn't thought of that, how depressing.

this is why I worry about mum's weight loss - I appreciate some people just get thinner as they age but she will be losing lots of muscle mass as well.

why would people losing mobility want a bed that's hard to climb into?! Because getting out is a bigger problem. When your thigh muscles have gone, it's difficult to stand up up your bum is lower than your knees, and a bed doesn't have a pair of convenient arms to lever yourself up with like an armchair does. So it's easier to have a really high bed so that you slither down into a standing position, if you see what I mean.

sloth I am so sorry for your loss, and you sound like a wonderful daughter and she will have known how much she was loved.

The princess and the pea: mum was like this, with the bed on extra wooden blocks, plus at least 12 pillows she could sleep propped upright. I am not sure this was good, as the minute she woke up she'd get up and fall over, ad infinitum, rather than waiting til she'd properly woken up. She did have a furniture route, luckily it was all pretty stable/solid until she got to the door into the bathroom.

For Sale board went up on her house today which has made DD2 very sad. First viewing today - no feedback yet - and another lot coming on Mon.

Threetoedsloth I posted on the bereavement board a bit after dad died....things like junk mail still upset me. It's a nice board but it can be a bit overwhelming, though perhaps that's the situation rather than the board.

re financial stuff and control, I have no objection to mum doing it 100% herself if she didn't ask a million questions or have panic attacks. I'm hugely impressed with how quickly she has learned a lot of stuff.

but as Dint says, the million questions is how delays will happen and things will go wrong - and at the moment, she has a lot of letters to write, which she wants to hand write, meaning she'll do a draft, do a second, then ask me to check it, then check it over herself 100 times while muttering and asking me not to leave the room....

I appreciate that she and I have honest conversations about this, I think that's very big of her that she's not lost her temper (even though I have!) but I just can't see how to move forward when the help she wants is the kind of help I wouldn't give if you paid me. Like if you said "here is a job being PA to someone who lives in the Victorian age" as I posted on the probate board when I started on that....

also she refuses to let me put in any kind of filing system. She and dad apparently thought it was logical that the car insurance document was in a biscuit tin full of other random papers in the kitchen, the bank statements are in random drawers upstairs in no order, the tax receipt for the car might be in a handbag.....I mention the idea of a simple file and mum has kittens, because to her, the random dotting around the house is logical - presumably because she's kept her car insurance in a biscuit tin for years!

the beds - so that is a thing? But why do people want high beds? The last mattress dad bought was a disaster - too high and didn't really fit the bed. Mum couldn't face telling him to change it and now says she's used to it, but even when I sit on the bed for a moment, I feel like I'm about to slide off it!

why would people losing mobility want a bed that's hard to climb into?!

Grace- my DH and I ran mum's finances this last year. Mum had been very independent up until being very poorly Christmas 2017. Just before she fell ill she had (thank goodness) given us PoA.
When mum first came out of hospital she retained some interest in her financial affairs but we batted her off because she would have fretted terribly about the cost of private carers 4 times a day.
She quickly stopped asking about her accounts and let us run "Mum Ltd" without any fuss.
I appreciate that your mum still very much has capacity (as did my mum for the first two or three months of last year) and I understand completely that your mum asking a million and one questions will be terribly stressful for you. I do feel for you. You are in an invidious position.
Thanks for the kind thoughts. I do appreciate the good wishes and flowers.

cockroach The Archers board managed to get MN to produce them an Archers icon (a pub sign with a bull on it). Would we get anywhere asking for a cockroach?

Her bed is like the Princess and the Pea's DF is the same. A divan, and then another foam mattress on top, which is shorter than the divan mattresses, and which keeps shifting so that it overhangs and tips him on to the floor. I think it's the "make do and mend" mentality. He wants the third mattress for height, but is suggesting that we instead stand the bed feet on 6inch block of wood - what could possibly go wrong? He also wants us to bolt the wardrobe to the wall so he can use the doorknob to pull himself upright. And it's impossible to find out what he actually needs, for example if we had a bar fixed to the wall, where he would need it, because a) he can't hold a coherent conversation long enough to explain what he needs and b) "not invented here" so it won't be any use anyway.

Grace when I took over some of DFs paperwork, I did it on the condition that I would not tell him anything about it ever. His idea would be that, eg, a savings bond would mature. I would print out for him all the small print for every possible savings bond that he could move the money to, he would read all the small print in fine detail, then talk to me about it in fine detail (incidentally getting everything muddled up), worry about losing all his money because of some obscure clause that he didn't understand, until finally, months later, he would make his decision, and I would find out that the chosen bond was no longer available and we'd start all over again. Sounds like your Mum might go the same way! So I suggest you activate PoA only for things she agrees to hand over to you entirely.

SS seem to think it's so easy - they make a suggestion like "we'll put up a grab rail" or "he can have a call alarm", and have no idea of the hours of "discussion" that go into persuading the elderly to accept the idea. I think they just think we're not looking after our elderly very well. They'll find out, when they have elderlies of their own to look after!

gutrotweins you are the second person I've heard saying about an elderly parent having a bed like princess and the pea. I'm wondering what it's about?

I suppose I'm also wondering - those who do paperwork for elderlies, do you just do it and not show them anything? Because that's what I'd want to do, but mum's plan for me to do it would be that she could ask me millions of questions instead of asking the bank or the solicitor.

yolo Notaflying
Our house hasn't been assessed by any NHS workers, but she has been living here with poor mobility for a number of years. The OT at the hospital also promised a look around, but of course that never materialised due to the intermediate care. Her bed is like the Princess and the Pea's, so we'll take a few layers of that to make it a normal height.

Private care is now organised, 3x a day - no help from local services. TBH, we used these carers for a week when she broke her arm - they're local and lovely. In fact, they're the only people who've assessed the house for safety!

Dm was very confused today. Very paranoid about the home. At least they've stopped all the useless meds she was taking (several of which were exacerbating the problems), so we won't have to get them down her .

I'm really hoping the doctor will help in some way.
(I'm rambling - sorry)