The Cockroach Cafe Mark 2 (general coping with oldies)

[yolofish]

Morning all! regulars or newbies, coping with your oldies is a frustrating, exhausting and difficult business however much we love them. The Cockroach Cafe is open to all, a place to vent, rant, ask questions, get advice, and hopefully laugh too.

For newbies: why cockroach? My DM attended a 'small animal event' in a nursing home, and was presented with a "small animal with a hard back" the name of which species she couldn't remember. My ever helpful DB suggested cockroach, and it has become a toast on here. So cockroach mes amis/amies, and may you all live to fight another day.

How are you all doing? mere how is your df?
All calmish here..... touch wood.

I spoke to df on phone last night. A bit confused, but cheerful. Still no symptoms apart from fatigue. It's 3 weeks today since he first tested positive.

Fingers crossed dint

He's trying to drive me mad. 2.5 weeks with not a word from him, then I got the manager to stand over him while he dialled me and we had a good chat. The next day I missed a call from him, a few hours later he got through but put the phone down after saying hello03., yesterday he rang me to tell me he was in the middle of having his dinner (just as I was trying to cook ours), then half an hour later he rang again to tell me he'd finished his ice cream.

Oh dint how frustrating- but sounds like he is doing ok?

Hello may I join in the chat? You may have seen I have started a couple of thread regarding the decline of DM who is now in a MH unit awaiting diagnosis after it all coming to a head on Tuesday.

I'm so shocked it has come to this, I honestly thought she would spend a couple of nights in hospital and then come home but as she refused to see the MH team, they had to section her (with my agreement) as they did not think she was safe at home.

I am going to see her this afternoon in the grounds of the hospital which luckily is very close to me. She is absolutely clueless that there is anything wrong with her so we are going to have some interesting conversations! She is 87 this year.

Hi Everyone, I posted on here when my DM was staying with me. We moved her into her house and things got better for a while but now they are worse. I do her shopping twice a week and am on call for every minor disaster. Her memory is worse, she rang me on her mobile phone last night to tell me she lost her mobile phone (meaning her mobile phone charger) so I went round to give her mine. This morning she has asked me to give her back the spare key to her house, because she suddenly doesn’t trust us. It follows a pattern that when I help her, like Wednesday when I took her shopping and to the bank and spent ages with her she will ring me up later and be very spiteful and mean, she even threatened to go to the police about me (because I helped her move money into her savings account earlier that day as she had wanted, rather than donate it all to some mythical charity she had just decided about). I’ve got two uncles, one is very supportive and available and understands what’s going on and sees her every week for a walk and a chat, the other is distant, hasn’t physically seen her since Christmas (and that had to be forced) and speaks to her on the phone, guess which one she trusts and goes to for advice? Yep, the distant one! She is in complete denial about her memory and says it’s “normal ageing memory loss”. She’s 64. She lost her husband, last year to suicide and says the memory loss is due to trauma, but it started before he died. She was also treating him like she treats me. I feel sick every morning and I snap at my husband and son all the time. I know she probably feels even worse but I really can’t cope with this. My dad has Huntington’s disease and I was his carer for 7 years before he went into a home, I know what direction life is taking me in. I know I can’t but I fantasise about driving away from all this down to a beach and just sitting there until someone else takes over.

Fly and sinister welcome to the cub no-one wants to be in...
fly hope the visit goes well...just say the doctors need to check you are ok etc... will be v hard but you know she is being cared for.
sinister sounds really tough- would she see a doc? sounds like paranoia.... please press for an appt and send the gp your observations in advance.

Oh dint how frustrating- but sounds like he is doing ok? Yes, it does. He's now passed the 3 weeks mark.

flygirl good luck for this afternoon. That's a really difficult situation for you.

sinister What you're experiencing is not unknown. She's losing her grip on the world and trying to make sense of it in a way that doesn't call the working of her brain into question. So if it's a choice betweeen a) she's completely forgotten making a decision and b) you've done something against her will, she's going to go for b) every time.

It may be that her memory problems started before losing her husband, but the loss, in such a way, will have had a bad effect, and it will seem to her that it's only since her husband died.

It seem to me that you're not the right person to be helping her at the moment. She isn't trusting you, and the way she treats you is damaging your well-being. Sadly, the only way you will get someone else to take over is to walk away and sit on the figurative beach. But now may be the time that you need to do that. Please seek help, for yourself as well as for her.

Morning all. One of the benefits of the current situation has been telepone appointments with the doctor, mum called on Monday and had a chat with the doctor within an hour. She has a referral to the memory clinic which I'm really pleased about because we've been ignoring the elephant in the room since March. In the before times this would have meant making an appointment and me taking her and would have taken at least a week.

Minor rant incoming - I am sick to the back teeth of doing shopping for other people. I'm not travelling across town to do my shopping in MIL's local supermarket, I am being totally unreasonable and doing my shopping in my local supermarket where I know my way around and can find everything. She's bored and wants to go shopping and that's her choice. My choice is not to take her. What I really need is to have a couple of weeks off and this be someone else's responsibility for a while.

Hear you knot shopping in an unfamiliar shop in these strange times is even more stressful than normal.
You deserve a break. 🌺🌺

Shopping is crap at the moment. We're shielding, but if I ask someone to get some shopping for me, I really can't give them a list beginning "cumin, ground almonds, rice paper, tahini". Yet those are some of the things that make meals interesting, and at the moment we need interesting meals to punctuate the weeks. And so I don't ask anyone (I'm lucky to be able to get online deliveries). One of the downsides of doing more than you are willing to do or can be reasonably expected to do is that it becomes impossible to spare a thought for how rubbish it is to be dependent on other people.

Dint I know that I would be impossible to shop for because this has brought home to me just how picky I am. For example there have been no dried chickpeas but plenty in tins. I don't want tinned, I want dried or put another way, I want what I've always had. You'd be getting the two items on your list that they sell in Aldi, the half jar of tahini on the shelf and the promise of the remainder with my next click and collect order.

I haven't bought rice paper in about 40 years, I could just eat a macaroon now.

I could just eat a macaroon now. I found a half packet of ground almonds in the cupboard and made a batch - first time in years, and they were so easy. They were wonderful. We managed to spread them over 3 days and the memory sustained me for a few more. Since then, ground almonds several weeks in succession were hit by "I'm sorry, some items are missing from your order...". Now I've got the almonds, and am puzzling what to do in lieu of rice paper. I'm not willing to try and make it myself.

I'm also realising the difference between gardening for fun, and gardening because you have a real need to fill in between deliveries, so that a germination failure or a spell of adverse weather at a critical point means no fresh veg for a week.

Dint I'd go with baking parchment if you don't have one of the non stick baking sheets. I think you really ought to try for science and not just for additional macaroons.

I've cut mum's hair today. It needed doing for several months before lockdown started so it was well beyond the stage of needing attention. I won't be giving up my day job but it looks reasonable now. She is pleased with it and didn't take up my offer of a brown paper bag as day wear. I don't get mad with her because there is no one else but me to do what needs doing, I am frequently raging with my MIL situation because I feel put upon. She has actual family, children and siblings but lockdown meant that they couldn't possibly do anything. I have this special pass from Boris that means I can shop, clean, change lightbulbs, fix computers and washing machines and programme central heating and telephones. It's not as if they let just anyone care for the vulnerable. See, I'm off again. Please pass the macaroons.

Macaroons as requested knot- shop bought. As I don't have dints mastery in the cooking department sadly....
So sorry you have to do so much. Dm keeps moaning about her hair but i wont go near......

No cooking mastery here - macaroons are simple, I was surprised they were so easy, if I'd known that I'd have been baking them weekly for the past 30 years.

Feeling a bit tearful this evening. Though it was the succession of phone calls and emails from three separate friends who are going through combinations of horrors, followed by a more than usually incoherent phone call from my father. But realise it's actually the talk with one of the nurses who says he's gone downhill, she thinks the Covid has really taken it out of him and he's lost his independence of spirit - he let her shave him. I think losing him has suddenly become more real, and it's upsetting me more than I thought it would.

I don't want to talk to DH and DCs, because he's important to them too. And at the moment I'm a bit short of friends who don't already have their own problems. Early night and teddy bear, I think.

Oh dint I’m sorry. It must be so sad to hear that about your dad. He sounds like such an amazing man.
Sending 🌺🌺 to you.
Talk here if it would help.

Thanks sandwich. It has already helped, just to say how I'm feeling. In a way I've lost so much of him already, I didn't think it'd worry me when I lost the rest. But I'd love to go and give him a hug and a kiss just now.

I am sorry dint, it is hard when the time that you need your friends to prop you up is the same time that they need you to prop them up. You could still talk to them you know, my friend was horrified to find what I'd kept quiet about when I knew that she was having Issues. I didn't want to add to her woes but actually she would have been glad of having something else to think about.

Long term symptoms after "recovery" are a known thing irrespective of age, your search term would be long tail covid. I know people in their 40s who are run down with niggling come and go symptoms months after they were "better". It's not necessarily a sign of irreversible decline, it could just be that he's not yet fully recovered.

Dint. My food shopping here is 99% unaffected. Very happy to get you all your offbeat tasty items and sending them on a 24 hr box. I’d be missing those things too.
Was in Waitrose today and no queues. None at Lidl either. Genuine offer.
My friend whose Mumsnet law 86 had Covid got to meet her last week by sitting on a bench outside in garden while MIL was 3m away still inside care home. All wearing masks. Apparently it took about 10 minutes for recognition but after a slow start Mum in Law started to respond. Difficulty was hearing each other.

Rinse That's so kind of you! Actually I'm OK now, and the only thing I haven't managed to get is the rice paper. Morrisons where we are is pretty good, and I'm maintaining good stock levels, so that if I'm searching for tahini it's because I've opened the last jar, not because I've used the last spoonful of the last jar. But it does of course mean that my shopping list never looks like what people would regard as "basics".

And although I muffed my order and had a two week gap, my next delivery is Tuesday - that's only a few days now.

Morning all. Things with DS continue to descend through the circles of hell. Hard to keep count of which particular fresh hell we are in currently (his bipolar is not in check as his meds aren't working). Getting help from the mental health team at the best of times is hard, but under lockdown it's non-existent.

DM continues to rumble on. Because of the dementia her mind resets very quickly, so in a half hour visit this week when I took some shopping over I had why won't I take her to get her hair cut, and why aren't I concerned at the fact I'm overweight, both on repeat.

Last night I succumbed to a school night vodka, only to be woken at 4am by DS cooking himself dinner, so I was loading the dishwasher at 5am and am due to start work at 9.

Cockroach all x

nota so sorry to hear about your ds- no wisdom possible but lots of sympathy.
And your dm- sending buckets of Teflon to apply to your shoulders to help you through.
dint Glad you are feeling better- sometimes saying the stuff helps even to some internet strangers. Glad you have supplies on their way.
cockroach all.

nota , fly , sinister to you all