to think my elderly Dad is losing the concept of time?

[Cailinsalach]

Every time he has an appointment he wants me to take him there far too early. It is driving me nuts. I seem to spend all my time waiting for hours in doctors/hospital/opticians/etc waiting rooms.

Today is so typical. He has a chiropodist appointment at 12.15. He decides he needs a visit to the barbers too. Both are in the same shopping area. This place is a 10 (ten!!) minute drive from our house. He wants to leave at 9.30am. The barbers doesn't have an appointment system but he rarely has to wait more than 10 minutes and he has a quick trim....no washing, blowdrying, extensions, high nor low lights. So I get him to hold on untill 10am. He then insists we leave and he emerges from the barbers at 10.30. (we stopped to buy papers thus delaying by another ten mins) We now have to wait until 12.15.
Aaaaarghhhhhh

It's part of a general anxiety about things which older people often have...their days are long and it's also possible he wants to spend some time with you.

You could go for coffee together? Window shop?

Sounds lonely....

I live with him. In fact he is probably a bit sick of me.
I think Edwardsmum has hit the nail. He is lonely. All his friends are dead or in care homes. He misses Mum quite badly. Ah well. I shall suck it up.

It's an anxiety thing. I think he's worrying about his ability to make plans, and is adding on extra to make sure he's ok, then not realising that he has already made allowances, and adding more on to the original plan, then more again. Hence, even though you can work out that there was more than enough time, he starts fretting about being late long before it could actually be a problem.

Even if you reassure him, and talk him through exactly how long it takes, and how much extra you have already allowed for, I'm guessing that short-term memory issues mean that he doesn't actually have the capacity to remember that it has been gone through and worked out, and he defaults back to being anxious.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's any good answer. . Maybe you could just allow for it, and make sure you plan for having a lot of extra time on these trips - is there a cafe nearby where you could sit and kill some of the time?

Has he got any hobbies at all Cailin? Anything he does regularly?