I’m a kind and giving person, I support my family, friends and do voluntary work. However, right now, I feel like screaming. My mother in law is staying with us (she arrived on Tuesday from hospital) in our tiny house. Background: she is 82, has been showing increasing signs of dementia of some kind, she lives alone, over the last ten years or so, she has increasingly isolated herself from friends, she positions herself as the sole Carer for my partners’ disabled brother. My brother in law has MS but is totally capable of looking after himself. She gets up at 2am, cleans her house , gets the first bus to his house at 5.30am, she’s been mugged twice walking through a dodgy estate to get to the bus stop and has been told by us and advised by the police to stop travelling so early to the bus. Even though my brother in law wants to stay in bed til a reasonable hour, she arrives and starts cleaning. The real reason she visits every day is to feed feral cats and she’s bored (suggestions to socialise fall on deaf ears).. She has my brother in law at her beck and call all day every day. We have offered to help but we are blocked at every turn. I’m sure wider relatives think we are terrible leaving this little old lady to do all the caring. She had a chest infection from before Christmas, refused to go to the doctor to get antibiotics, we ended up taking her to a walk in centre, she didn’t take her medication and a week later we brought her to our house and that day we had to call an ambulance to take her to hospital with breathing difficulties. The ambulance trip ended with four days in hospital. She is now at ours, she has our room (of course and that’s absolutely right), my partner has the sofa bed and I have a futon in the spare room. It is day to day hell as we are subjected to the endless martyr act. My pillows aren’t right, the cushions aren’t right, I don’t want any food (I can see her watching my out of the corner of her eye as she refuses food - it’s like dealing with a child), my mum (a 73 year old lively stoic) comes over after a half hour drive to help with some of the stress. It is day 5, we have the constant refrain of I don’t want to be any trouble, I could just go back to hospital. No, you fucking can’t, there are no beds, you are well enough to come home, you have two people looking after you (I - now hugely regretfully - work from home). More background: she bullies the disabled BIL and has done for the last five years with increasing bile, she physically abused my partner as a child. I can’t bear to have her in my house. We’re taking her to the doctor on Monday, we will sit in the consultation with her to find out about her myriad of illnesses and hear from the doctor what his thoughts rather than getting “I can’t remember what he said”. I think it’s memory clinic and Carers visiting her to get her to take her medication, my partner is in complete denial about dementia and reckons she’s fine. All the signs of dementia are there: shuffling, anger, memory loss, forgetting to eat and hoarding money (2500 quid under the sofa) I found food shopping in her spare room and years of unwrapped presents from us which is understandable but hugely hurtful. It’s self-denial and martyrdom left right and centre. I bought her underwear and nightclothes as she had none: what did you do that for? Because you aren’t looking after yourself, won’t wash yourself and we look like the shittest son and DIL in the world when we were at the hospital. And she has just thrown herself on the floor when I was unpacking the shopping as I watched her - she’d had a row with DP. I am SO angry. I feel like staying at a friend’s but then I feel like I’m being bullied out of my own home. She would like nothing more than to sink her claws into my partner who’s had counselling because of her abuse and have another person to dance to her tune. How can I stop this shitty bullying behaviour? P.s. partner has got his head round dementia after talking to cousin. We just need some strategies to help.