Cockroach Cafe - Autumn

Yes for assisted bin collection. Also mums local council agreed to replace her numerous recycling bins with one mahoosive general waste bin. Like @rookiemere we had problems with used tena pants ending up in any bin except general waste.

it felt wrong putting recycling in a bin to be thrown away and some days I took some home and put it in my own, but generally it solved that particular problem.

(in their day mum and dad were the binfluencers on their street and put out the bins for people on holiday, so she’d done her turn)

Where’s the vallium?

My mum is obsessed with recycling. She used to put all her fruit and veg scraps in a compost bin (she has a gardener) but it's at the end of the long garden and she was using a big bucket inside the house which took ages to fill with it just being her so only emptied it every few weeks and was a horrible smelly health hazard with those tiny flies around it, I tried and tried to get her to stop and just bin it all but no. Council finally introduced food recycling this month and I though oh good, this will help as they provide a small caddy but she can't get her head around the instructions for bag use AT ALL and is texting me virtually every day about it.

@HoneyButterPopcorn there a bucketful on the side. Be careful not to mix with too much gin though.

Argh this bins talk has brought me straight back to my mum’s bin situation before she moved.

She had fractured two vertebrae and her neighbours had been taking her bins to the kerb (she had a gravel drive and massive bins as tall as she is) but it seemed wrong to rely on that.

After many phone calls I tracked down the correct council department and person and posted a note from her GP. Great, all good. But her lovely neighbours kept putting out the bins, and every time they did the system would reset and the council would stop taking the bins. If I wasn’t there she often didn’t notice until they were almost full so I would have to email. Then the crew would change seasonally and everything would stop again and I would have to wait for DM to notice and then I would email the council to refresh their memory etc etc.

One more thing from that era I don’t miss.

Yes, one big general waste bin has been suggested for Mum but she can't get her head around the idea that she would be 'allowed' to put recycling on the general bin. She became slightly obsessed with getting her bins 'right' when she was living in her house and even now that doesn't spend much time there she tends to have a cupboard full of empty packaging that she has convinced herself can't be put in her bin or she will get 'in trouble'. I usually take it home with me to recycle- she doesn't seem worried about me being told off! Until the very end of his life Dad had been the person who put bins out for all the neighbours. Before I arranged the assisted collection Mum was adamant that I should ask one of them to return the favour, which of course was not an option since they are all even older or more infirm than her.
Unfortunately Mum's dementia means that she doesn't seem to realise that her peers are also in their 80s and not that fit. She finds it very frustrating that she doesn't have a steady stream of old friend visiting and helping her out.

Is wine ok though? My doctor suggested witness protection last time I went to see him. I’m sorely tempted…

Anyone any experience of fire risk and the elderly? ER lives in an extremely high risk house and makes some very poor choices around fire safety. She's already caused a flashup/chip pan type fire, but thank God the main flame hit the one non-flammable part of the kitchen and so it didn't quite ignite. Social Services are telling us that it's fine because they've put in new smoke detectors, but we don't think she would respond if they went off. Nothing anyone has tried will change her high risk behaviour around using the oven and hob and last time we switched them off at the consumer unit, she climbed up to switch them back on. Arrg!!

Only anecdotal but does anyone else have experience of this. Did a 22 hour stint in A and E with ER the other day. Part corridor care and part private booth. Got talking to a couple with their ER in exactly the same wait. We got chatting and I expressed concern for any elderly person without family support in A and E. The guy actually said that when their ER had been in A and E alone they seemed to have been fast tracked and in a private booth all along (frail no dementia so knew exactly what went on). I was surprised but then started to think that there might be something to it, all the accompanied ones were getting basic care like drinks etc from family and ignored for hours by the staff. Presumably the unaccompanied ones were checked on more often and needed to be gone quicker!

@roundaboutthehillsareshining , have you tried contacting the local fire service liaison office? They can pay a visit, offer advice, take away potentially dangerous chip pans etc. Might she listen to a nice fireman?

@roundaboutthehillsareshining I'd ask the fire brigade too, but also you can get smart smoke alarms that link through the house with more chance of them being heard and can alert you on an app, so depending on circumstances you could get round there/call neighbours/call fire brigade. They tell you which part of the house the smoke is in and also monitor for carbon monoxide. My mum very rarely cooks now and never deep fries but I worry about the amount of extension leads everywhere and their wiring being old etc. But of course she won't let me change anything.

https://www.firstalert.com/pages/sc5-smart-smoke-co-detection

I don’t know how it works but DM’s smoke alarm is somehow linked to her Careline alarm. I’m not sure if the signal sets it off, it’s a bit mysterious. She had a fire engine and several firemen there last year when she burned toast and set it off.
I only found out when neighbours told me of course.

We've had the fire brigade "safe and well" team round many times. They've always been very honest, the house is dangerous. One of them told me never to let my family sleep there at the same time, but to have someone awake in the house at all times on fire watch. But it's ER's own home...

The new smoke alarms are "smart" and apparently alert a call centre as well as the fire brigade automatically. But they're 20 minutes away, ER is in the middle of nowhere and the fire brigade reckon about 15 minutes for the house to be well ablaze, so it is relying on her hearing the alarm and getting out, no messing about.

The risky behaviour isn't about cooking, it's about heating, regardless of how many safe heaters are provided.

She wrote soaf. She had dettol soap down on her list and in the same list she had soaf anti bac.

Either way I closed whatever this was. I wasn't going to spend a few hours browsing online for her.

@roundaboutthehillsareshining Isn't this another example of there being nothing at all you can do to prevent a very predictable and preventable crisis, because an elderly person has mental capacity and is therefore free to make bad decisions. Clearly no one wants to end up in a situation where older people are not allowed to live their own lives but I do think where there is a real safety risk it should be easier to get some sort of intervention. It's not just about the elderly person's safety- what about the fire fighters, neighbours, visitors (which could include carers etc). A friend of mine had a similar situation with an aunt who on several occasions 'forgot' that she had the gas oven/hob on. Social services basically said nothing could be done unless there was a fire or injury. Luckily friend managed to persuade the Aunt that there was a problem with her cooker, had it removed and installed a microwave (and supply of ready meals) 'just for now'. If Aunt had refused there could well have been a dangerous fire.

Oh my goodness, I need to vent. She was chopping vegetables today for her lunch. Then a while later I found she had trays of chopped onions left in many rooms all around the house - the sitting room, the bathroom, the spare room. It smelled horrible.

I asked her why she had onions all around the house and she said it gets rid of smells. She said she read it in a magazine as a tip or life hack. To put cut onions in rooms.

I didn't recognize any smell until I was hit with onion smells today. Bear in my mind there's no smoker in the house. It doesn't smell of smokers.

She has been engaged in some increased OCD and cleaning over the past week.

I went away for the weekend the weekend before last, just for a few days. I think maybe it was that, that spurred an increased OCD spell from her. Maybe loneliness or boredom or whatever it was.

If I had a diagnosis I would be able to tell people that I am living with someone with a cognitive decline and I would be able to advocate for her better and draw on supports.

My siblings live abroad and they don't understand and they are writing if my concerns in favour of a textbook style of senior senile behaviour.

This is another vent, her demeanour lately is one of suspicion, paranoia and resentfulness against me too. Even though I do so much to help.

This was the final straw for mum to go into a care home. Got a call from the carers to say they'd walked in to the kitchen and hallway filled with smoke, a pan in flames and mum looking puzzled wondering what that noise was. It is as 3 smoke detectors.

I like the sound of your doctor. That's very funny.

Oh dear @HoneyButterPopcorn you sound very frazzled.

The advice you were given on here when you posted under a different name was to move out, I remember.

@HoneyButterPopcorn just flgo for the wine and forget the valium. Tastes nicer

Blimey, I hadn’t realised that was the final straw for your mum. It was always my fear as I knew mine wouldn’t process the sound of the smoke alarm at all. I got a water alarm for when she overfilled the bath and the carer walked into the water pouring through the dining room ceiling (again) and a deafening 100+dB alarm and mum in bed totally oblivious. She could hear the alarm but had no idea that it indicated something needed her urgent attention. It’s actually quite scary to think that the basic thought process of “what the hell is that noise, I’d better go and find out” disappears while one is still physically capable of causing havoc.

@roundaboutthehillsareshining sympathies. Might sound a bit hard, but if she did set a fire is her house detached or would there be neighbours affected? We had an incident with the gas fire and filling the house with gas, so I had it isolated from the supply so she couldn’t do that any more. I thought a gas explosion would impact neighbours a lot more than a fire. Once I fixed that, we lived with the risk as she didn’t cook any more or do anything with a naked flame.

I'm joining @HoneyButterPopcorn on the Valium. Full blown falling apart here, all day. The very small straws that finally broke me - support worker calling in sick and DM blowing up the electrics again.

I just can't face any more long journeys, advice being ignored, no consistent help coming from anyone except DH. My life feels like it been on hold for years with the needs of DF, DM and DMIL, and I just cannot do this anymore.

I am contacting my GP tmw and hoping for witness protection too. Failing that more Valium. Or perhaps joining the Foreign Legion?