My 85yo grandma has it, she found out last summer. I can't remember exactly what type it is that she has but apparently it's not the bad kind that'll kill you, it's the kind of thing she'll die with and not from. And it's more common in old people too. She said they won't treat it until her symptoms get worse, which I believe they are doing but she won't see it. She knows her symptoms are from the illness but she doesn't see that she's getting worse iykwim?
She sleeps ALL the time, I do her shopping and take her to the library and to coffee with her friends every week. A lot of times when I walk in the house, she's asleep at the dining table just sitting up in the chair. She sleeps the evening away in front of the TV and wakes up to go to bed around 1am, then sleeps until lunchtime. Throughout the day she'll just drop off sitting at the table or in the armchair.
She has a gas fire in the front room and I've had to go down to her house more than once recently to pick her up off the floor because she fell asleep when she was sitting on the footstool while lighting the fire (don't even get me started on how dangerous THAT is! I've lectured her several times about this) and slipped off.
She barely eats and is dropping weight at a scary rate, she buys her meals from Wiltshire Farm Foods and she gets the small meals which I think are half portions and absolutely tiny. Most nights she throws half away because it's too much.
She gets bouts of diarrhea almost every week that last a day or two at a time. She's always complaining of random muscle type pain that's come from nowhere (ie, when she hasn't slipped off the stool again), and she gets very breathless walking any distance that's longer than from her house to my car (and I park right outside her front door).
I'm not the only one that's worried either, I had Grandmas friend phone me on Tuesday to tell me she's worried. This friend was a nurse for 30 years and she can tell when a person is very unwell. She's been friends with my grandma for some years now so she knows her really well, they get together every Saturday afternoon and she says she can tell there's something not right with her at all. On Monday afternoon grandma phoned me at around 2pm and she sounded so confused and disoriented, she asked if I'd phoned her and told me she'd only woken up 20 minutes ago.
I don't know what we can do to get grandma to the doctor, if we did get her to go she'd probably downplay it all, she 'doesn't like to make a fuss' 🤦🏼♀️
What the hell do we do?!