Cockroach cafe - Spring to Summer 2026

Thank you.

Ultimately the CH will do whatever is needed. DB is mithering (possibly just to me) rather than actually doing anything.

He doesnt 'approve' of morphine but there isnt anything else which hits the mark.

I think he is offering up a contrary view so that he isnt responsible.

@GnomeDePlume I know how hard this must be, but please, are you able to tell the CH staff to give your mother the morphine anyway, and to disregard what your brother says?

Your DM is dying. Your brother cannot face that, clearly. He needs to be told that allowing your mum to die without suffering is a great act of kindness.
In many ways it's the greatest act of kindness that a parent can receive from a child who loves them.

I'm so sorry you're having to cope with this.

@Choconuttolata messaged DB2 to keep him in the loop in case he got ordered to go to mum's but unfortunately he's in the Canaries until next week 😂.

@GnomeDePlume at this point if she is distressed and he refuses it but you agree and a GP or palliative care doctor agrees it is in her best interests the care home will act on that and ignore him. What a knob!

When DH's siblings tried to override my MIL's DNAR and refused to allow her life support to be turned off (she was dying of sepsis due to a long term illness that she knew would eventually kill her hence the DNAR) he was the only one who agreed and that was all the doctors needed to go ahead as per MIL's wishes.

Sorry about your horse @countrygirl99 definitely leave golden balls to deal with the bank card issue.

DF has declined in both his eyesight and cognition quite rapidly and cannot manage any banking related stuff. In rare moments of lucidity he does do some weird rearranging of files, so I have to keep an eye that he doesn't throw away mail that could be important.

If we weren't local he would already be in a care home we have been there twice a day for toilet accidents most days this week. I think he might have another UTI, just waiting for the results of his latest sample to come back as the test strips aren't positive.

<Sigh> DM is in distress. CH are talking about giving her morphine. DB doesnt want this because DF reacted badly when taken off morphine after major surgery.

He is basically wanging on about stuff he has read online.

I have got fed up with him and said that CH know more about EOL management than he does and that if he starts objecting to medical care decisions then CH may end up calling an ambulance.

Weirdly mum has just phoned. She says she's lost her debit card. Last time she told me that it was in her purse. I don't have POA so nothing I can do from home and I have an opticians appointment at 3 then need to do my horse who's still in strict isolation so wouldn't be there until 6 at the earliest. Then I'd need to phone and get her to give the bank permission to speak to me. So goldenballs is going to have to deal with it and try to call her back and let her know what is happening 😄.

@countrygirl99 maybe that was one small upside of DM pretty much losing her ability to speak. She gave up trying to organise things over the phone after she phoned up the ambulance service to book one for a hospital appointment ( I had already booked the damn thing and told her so) her speech was so bad they thought she was having a stroke on the phone, called me at my exercise class and then DF ended up cancelling it which I then discovered the day before her appointment and had to do a lot of pleading to get it reinstalled.

I did give her quite a row about that and it seemed to work.

The moment my DF retired, DM relinquished any interest in finances and I’ve inherited the role. It’s funny because I clearly remember that it was Mum who ran the family budget, paid the bills, arranged insurances, booked holidays etc. Maybe it was the advent of internet banking as she never got the hang even of texting let alone email. I’ve largely cut out all the paper statements but the odd one gets through.
She did sack the window cleaner last year as he put his price up by £2! I’ve refused to look for another one.

@rookiemere mum just phoned the bank to cancel it. Funnily enough she can manage to phone the bank to cancel the cleaner payment and British Gas to report her heating isn't working when it is fine but not to phone any of her family. Her sister contacts me to find out how mum is as mum never answers the phone, neither drive now and sister doesn't live near mum.

@countrygirl99 gosh it’s like they have a playbook. DM queried the cleaner payments every time for about 4 months until they got a cleaner they liked so I guess she was worth paying after all.
Thankfully she couldn’t work internet banking to change it and as she was housebound DF was only able to cope with simple banking instructions like taking out cash.

Even then when they had a cleaner they liked they both just about had apoplectic fits when I insisted they give her a Christmas envelope with a week’s wages as a present, I think they wanted to kid themselves that she was just a family friend.

My mum insists on checking her bank statement even though my brother checks on line every week. She keeps cancelling the standing order for the cleaner as she doesn't know what the payment is for. I suppose she thinks the person who comes in every week to do 3 hours cleaning and laundry is doing it for fun.

@ElderlyDilemmas I have to admit to heaving a huge sigh of relief when DPs went into the care home and I switched the bank account to online only. My heart always sank when after the hours drive up and in between trying to sort out things that actually needed doing, DM insisted on scrutinising her large print bank statements line by bloody line, even though like you I had it on my phone app and checked every couple of days to make sure nothing untoward.
Ironically she would absolutely be freaking now as huge wads of money going out for the redecoration of the house to get it rented and various bits and pieces they need at the care home.
Sadly she is still trying to get us to bring and do lots of things which the care home should be handling, using DF as her flying monkey, so we need to gently push back on that. It’s not her fault its the dementia, but man its irritating. At least now we are only a few minutes away, so I can beat a hasty retreat.

@countrygirl99 that’s awful about your FIL’s care home behaviour, Mum isn’t that bad but I do think she needs to back off a bit and let him establish his own life in the home / keep her own social life going. Grrr to DH and the decorating.

I too have the never ending list of things that need doing for DPs and I strongly suspect DB does not, he just waltzes in, chats to them, sorts out anything very minor that doesn’t require speaking to anyone else, going to any shop, using his LPA, pats himself on the back for being a good son and clears off again to his nice house with no children and SAH wife.

Latest is that Dparents have a joint bank account, and because they are now listed as separate addresses they each get a statement. Paper because they always refused to do online banking. So on the one hand Mum is in a total panic that someone at the home might open Dad’s statement and use the details to steal all his money. But if I switch him to paperless it switches her too and then she gets hysterical that she won’t get a bank statement. And every time I fiddle with it the system sends her an automatic letter saying thank you for going paperless and causing more hysterics. She can’t have it both ways. Every bloody thing is a mountain out of a molehill. I can check her banking online any time, she’s not on a really tight budget and I can print statements too but this is not enough.

Why is it that they hang up if they are hearing something they don't like ?
My mil does this all the time but still expects me to come to the rescue when she feels another problem is coming on .
It's made me stop liking her .

@BestIsWest My list of things I need to do/organise for DM looks very much like yours and I couldn't agree more re rates of pay for decent carers. I know people often (rightly) complain about carers who are not good but realistically I think it's amazing that anyone can be persuaded to take on this kind of work for minimum wage. Obviously there's a big issue about how expensive care is without increased wages but I think the whole business of care for the elderly needs reviewing.

We had the first stage of mum's at home dementia assessment earlier this week, which went well I think and the person who came out seemed very knowledgeable and put mum at ease. She raised some questions and made some links that I hadn't considered. However, B and I seemed to come away with different interpretations of what she'd concluded. I think this could be similar to the situation GnomedePlume mentioned with her DB.
My view was that the assessor agreed with me that Mum's memory in itself is not bad but she clearly has problems with processing information/instructions plus delusions/hallucinations. Some of these in themselves could be side effects of physical illnesses or just normal aging but the way things are changing and the combination of symptoms raises concerns and needs more investigation. B interpreted the same discussions as her concluding that mum's memory is fine so she definitely doesn't have alzheimers and the rest of the symptoms are explained by physical illnesses or anxiety so with the right medication and someone with her to make sure she's not worrying she'll be fine.
There's no point in trying to debate this with him- he always knows best and won't listen at the best of times.

Just absolutely lost it with DH and it's entirely his own fault. We were supposed to be putting the house on the market in time for Easter but I'm having to nag him to do the jobs he's agreed to do. Yesterday he was supposed to be doing the gloss in the porch. We only used it as a store room and everything's a bit scuffed. I'd done all the prep and painted the walls he was meant to do the gloss yesterday afternoon while I was with the vet. Proudly told me it was all done but I didn't look until this morning. He's just done the window and totally ignored 2 doors! So now he's finishing that off instead of sorting out all his camera stuff that he leaves lying all over the house that's meant to be this afternoon's job. He got the full blast of "as if I didn't have enough in my plate without you acting like a 10 year old" and "you'd be the sort of old person we complain about in the cockroach café because you wouldn't organise yourself until it's too late".

@countrygirl99 oh your poor horse. And poor you!

@rookiemere that is it exactly. So many little things that DB doesn’t think of. This is my list for Monday and Tuesday this week of things I’ve had to do for DM. And when one tiny thing goes wrong then it generates half a dozen jobs.

I fully believe that we should be paying carers a much better wage. They are so undervalued.

@BestIsWest and @countrygirl99thats what makes everything so hard, the relentless drip of things not done entirely right by people not really paid enough to care. It really is whackamole and when it was happening I never quite knew what was going to find my last nerve- usually something seemingly small like the hairdresser ringing up to say she needed to change date or was running late. It often felt like I was the only adult allocated to the building.

I'm fully expecting an emergency this weekend. Horse is still in strict isolation so I can't ask any of the other liveries to cover. In addition he now has a swollen sheath due to being stables 24/7 so I need to apply KY jelly to his intimate areas do he doesn't have trouble weeing. Plus the bank holiday. Bound to get that emergency call. Missed a call from mum's phone Tuesday night. It's so rare for her to call I immediately panicked. Did she pick up when I called back...not a chance. Thankfully it was shortly before the evening carer was due so I tried a few times with no joy. I decided if there was a crisis I'd get a call. If I'd driven up the carer would have been and gone and no doubt mum would have forgotten she'd called let alone why. I suspect she momentarily remembered my birthday which was a couple of weeks ago.

@BestIsWest god forbid he was expected to take the initiative.

Strange how these things happen @countrygirl99!

Social Services insisted on taking over DMs medication after she made one too many mix ups and it was the main reason they decided she needed to continue having the carers after the six weeks allocated when she came out of hospital. And on the whole it’s been excellent because they do it all including ordering and collecting the repeat prescriptions. One less thing to worry about.

BIt DBs head off last night when he phoned to say DMs foot was looking red! What did he expect me to do about it? I’ve only taken her to hospital, organised district nurses, medication, extra carers etc. I told him to ring 111 if he was concerned. He hung up. Been up today and it is no worse that it was yesterday morning.

I'm building up a stockpile of mum's meds because I keep finding to he pivotells half full of meds the carers are meant to check she has taken. They always say the pivotell isn't working and moving on a slot. Not that they ever flag it as an issue until I say mhasonly taken her meds 3 days out of the last 14 and ask them to remind the carers to check. But funnily enough when I swap it out and take the old one home it's working just fine.

Fucking hell, you think all’s going well then…I’ve just had to stop the carer giving DM the wrong medication because she thought today was the third. And this mornings carer doesn’t seem to have given the antibiotic as the MAR chart hasn’t been signed.
If I hadn’t been there and spotted that the medication she handed DM wasn’t right then she’d have had a double dose of this mornings meds and no anti Bs. Have a call in to the care agency.