Caring for elderly parents? Pop in for support/advice/a bit of a rant...

[picklemepopcorn]

Pace yourself, it's a marathon not a sprint!

This is a safe place to offload- don't be embarrassed about how you feel. No judgement here...

There are lovely people here with practical experience of some of the issues which crop up who'll share their hard won knowledge!

glad you've taken the day off lighthouse, hope you can rest and relax or do something if it makes you feel better.

You could still use the DP putting his foot down line even if he doesnt see them (mine doesnt see DM but any suggestion he wasnt happy with how much time I'm taking with her would have her backing right off). Along the lines of "DP doesnt want /DP says I should/shouldn't / DP wants me to..."

Off to see mine in a min, via the opticians (new specs!). DB been on sentry duty waiting for psych all morning but have heard nothing. Will take him a sandwich.

Its all about male authority figures:

Dh says
The doctor says
The bank manager says

and so on. I've used all of them. Sadly my views did not count. And more sadly DB was not willing to weigh in to support me. She would have listened to him.

Today is all about you. Stay in bed. Watch daytime telly. Order a Deliveroo. Whatever
Make today (and ideally a few more) a time when you come first and do what YOU want. And if anyone demands anything say no. You are ill.

Thank you for the kind words, I really do feel ill tbh.

I can't use the DP line. It would quite reasonable for my parents to report that I'd be abducted by aliens and someone else planted in my body if I did that

I will be frank and tell them this is about my health and my future.

I spoke to my mother briefly this morning and said to her "I'm not going let that man break me". Her response was telling....She said "good, that's the right attitude".

She's told him not to call me though of course he might try. She will call in a couple of days.

Good to hear you are taking a day off, light. Some very wise advice here.
yolo, fingers crossed for pscyc and billy thinking of you.

We had the same "shunt them out quick" attitude from the hospital with my relative.
She fell out of bed twice whilst in their care (she'd said she didn't want the side of the bed up, and rather than consider what was on her best interests with regard to safety, they just went ahead and took it down), get belongings went missing, they didn't Shah her up as a dementia patient, they didn't allow for her partial paralysis, and they discharged her two days early to the care home. It was a complete shambles of elderly care.
I ended up lodging a complaint with PALS.

GAH. Stupid autocorrect.
*Her belongings
*Didn't set her up.

Thankfully the care home have been amazing. She's pretty settled now, but it was an utter nightmare at the time.

DM is so so out of it... they are now giving her morphine for pain (on top of oxycontin) so that doesnt help with the hallucinations and delirium and also aggression. Oth she is in less pain. She has started to develop a crackle on her chest and DB and I have just agreed 'no antibiotics'. I hope the hospital would ask us first before they considered starting them?

Marklah that sounds awful. We are already thinking about our next complaint to PALS, but it will be at the end of all this when I can condense my 10 pages of notes down to something submittable.

Yolo im afraid you need to tell the medical team pronto if you dont think anyibiotics are on her best interests - unless you have POA for heakth and welfare?

annan DB just been told that as she 'only' has a broken arm they would treat any infection if antibs reqd. POA is in the post I guess, signed and sent off a couple of weeks ago, but dont know if it would make any difference anyway. The 'only' broken arm is grotesque - extended in length, black/yellow/red bruising from neck to hand, two tennis ball sized lumps near the shoulder area, and you can't actually tell where her elbow should be. They now want to plaster the arm to stop the bones moving and thus reducing pain - why not an option on June 7 I dont know. We are also out of the 'window' for surgery which was ruled out on grounds of anaesthetic risk, altho that was over-ruled when she had the hip replacement sometime (losing plot now).

Still no bloody psych....

lighthouse I'm glad you got a reasonable response from your mum, dont answer if dad rings - turn phone off if need be.

Yolo treatment decisions are the consultant's if your dm doesn't have mental capacity. But they should be done in her best interests and to know what those are, they should consult you. I agree with you that it sounds like hr best interests would be not to treat actively. But if you think that, get it on record and speak to the consultant.

thanks annan I will try and do that tomorrow - good advice.

That's horrendous Yolo - of course the poor woman is delirious and aggressive with a completely untreated broken arm

We had the opposite issue with my mum in that they took days to start antibiotics after we'd had to point out she had infection in the shoulder they'd operated on.

I know everything is much more complicated when you've got age & health concerns, and delirium to take into account, but honestly it's not like it's a rare occurrence. They should be able to manage so much better than they do.

yolo with all of the MH assessments your mum has had recently, and been given a clean bill of health from, how on earth do they explain she thinks she's Princess Di?

I like the idea of a London meet up (even though I realise it wasn't offered to me). What do we collectively think about the idea, given that the people on this thread have given so much virtual support, would it be too much to meet IRL?

nota I think she has only had one 5 min mh assessment in all this time - despite promises etc? I know that seems ridiculous... psych consultant supposed to be going tomoz, just like psych liaison were meant to be going today. Dont think old people MH is that high a priority.
I would love to meet up with kindred spirits going through the same... I'm in deepest darkest Kent but could get to London

Ah, clearly I had assumed yolo that she'd had the assessments, given her behaviour during the hospital stays etc. God bless the NHS, but it does tend to be single-issue in its dealings with patients (and I guess elderly patients in particular).

Anyone else up for a London cockroach get together?

They seem to just expect the elderly patients to be confused. We had to repeatedly tell the nurses she had absolutely no dementia or confusion problems prior to hospital, they were amazed. (Which really reassured us that they were monitoring her mental state properly 🙄)

Flying monkey, I have been around this board for so long that I have met several people of an earlier generation. Experience is there is more gallows humour than ranting, but both are good. A couple of people helped me a lot.

Invitation is to anyone! I am in central London and work from home, so happy for people to message me (or post) suggesting when and where is convenient.

I hope Lighthouse had a good day. You will not be broken!

I’m just peering in, having been staying with my Mum for a few days. Met up with an old friend who had flown in from Canada to give her sister a break to go on holiday.

It’s the expectation that I will drop everything, family, home, job and rush down to stay for weeks if necessary to sort things out. She could do with a cleaner, but doesn’t want anyone in that she doesn’t know. And I wish she would stop driving.

I've just been told by our GP that my mum is most likely in end stage lung cancer. I've been at Uni as a mature student this year (2nd year) and my husband visits me, so I'm only home October, Christmas and Easter. When I came home in May I realised something was wrong, although I didn't know what. I've been trying since then to get help. She was finally referred to the hospital as one of the symptoms was she can now only whisper, so they tried to look in her throat with a camera. This didn't work so arrangements were made for her to have this done under a GA. I've just been on holiday for 3 weeks and came back this weekend to find she's cancelled the exploratory due to contacting the hospital to say she wasn't well enough to go in for a lung function test. I've also found out that for the last 2 weeks my brother, who lives with her has been having to get her out of bed, dress her, help her downstairs and once she is there she has been unable to get herself up off the sofa whilst he is as work. GP came out today and said there is no way they will do an exploratory, she's not well enough to undertake it and he will arrange to have some scans done again as soon as possible. He also said he can't believe they have missed this. I'm not sure why I am posting this, but I just feel I need to be able to chat with the group whilst I'm trying to support her.

That sounds bloody hard Lally. Sounds like maybe your mum didn't want to 'burden you'?

Hi

I have a slightly didffertn situation to the rest but I am still supporting to elderly parents.
My dad is 82 and still sharp as a tack up top but he has leg ulcers that give him no end of trouble. He gets them dressed twice a week but they still flair up badly. At the moment he is on strong antibiotics as when they took the dressings off the ulcers were black and there was as awful smell. Which to be honest you can smell while in the same room as him. As you can imagine this has a negative impact on his mobility and independence so he needs support there.
My mum is younger shes 66 but is suffering from anxiety, depression, paranoia not 100% which one but seems like all three at times. She is on medication but really doesn't seem to make much difference but she refuses to go to the gp and if she does she tells them half truths. She lives her life in what i call " what if land " she spends her days concocting all these wild fantasies. I will give you an example. She worries her cat will jump up on the kitchen bunker, knock the plug into the hole, knock on the tap and flood the house. For starters her cat is 15 and couldn't jump an inch in the air if it tried buy apart from that how does a cat knock a plug into a hole perfectly and with enough force that it stays in. To her all these scenarios she concocts are very real and possible. She seems fixated on water and fire. She is very reliant emotionally on me and texts hundreds of times a day and if i don't reply straight away she gets worse. I go into see her once or twice a week and she sits and goes through one worry after another and it doesn't matter how much I tell her that it will never happen or its not plausible she will not listen. Its like ground hog day with her.
Sorry i should have said my parents are seperated. This is all very mentally draining on myself especially with my mums situation. I am married, have my own family and work. I just don't know how some of the people here manage to juggle everything with parents that are worse than mine. I take my hat off to you all.
Sorry that was all very longwinded!

Terrible spelling mistakes sorry

Sounds very draining Ally. Are you the only child? If so the only thing you can do is try and take breaks every now and again for your own health.

My Dad is suffering a lot of pain and loss of mobility. He has two fractures and I fear it is only downhill from now on.

I'm no where near London I'm afraid but have a great meet up.

No I have two elder siblings one lives in Ireland and the other in the same town. My sister tries to help as much as she can with my mum. However my dad is her stepdad and not on good terms so that all falls to me

God that's tough ally.

It sounds as if your mum has some kind of anxiety disorder. Im not a psychiatrist though. It sounds as if medication plus intensive CBT might help her, but God knows how you get access to that

Could you start randomly slowing down your text response to her? Not a fixed time - i think if you said 'i won't text after 8pm' she would just start focusing her worries on that time, but every now and then just switch your phone off for an hour/few hours/ few days and if she chews your ear off, just change the subject?

And do think about writing a letter to her GP about what you are really seeing. They can't discuss her with you but you can give them information. There might be sone sort of service available for her, you never know wouldn't hold your breath

In the meantime, what about entering into her fantasies but make them even crazier? 'Yes and the cat would be swimming in the house and what if the flood washed it out of the chimney and it hit your neighbour on the head and knocked him out?!' Send them off into the stratosphere?