Cockroach Cafe - newly refurbished for the summer

[MereDintofPandiculation]

Welcome into our newly refurbished cafe. We've got rid of the Bad Daughters' bench - it was getting too small - and refitted the main room as a Bad Daughters' room, with comfy sofas, coffee, chocolates and drinks of your choice. (There is a good daughters' room - go down that corridor there and you'll find it tucked behind the stairs. It's not yet been fully furnished - we haven't had a visit from a Good Daughter in I don't know how long).

Anyway, come in when you want to share good news, or to rant, or to ask a small question that doesn't warrant its own thread. Or just to hang out with others who understand what you're going through.

For newbies: why cockroach? Previous long term resident of "Elderly Parents" Yolo's 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. Her 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.

Oh no, Minty. Hope your head is not too bruised from banging it against a brick wall... I have lost track of the L saga - is he still visiting her through an agency? And if so can you report him for inappropriate conduct? Or is it all non-official and mainly down to your mum these days?

@IthinkIsawahairbrushbackthere I suggested counselling- can completely understand your feelings but do give yourself some time to yourself. And seize the joy you so very much deserve. It’s still early days for your mum- she may settle more, may not. But live your life.
And @MintyCedric- well, all I can say is grey rock, grey rock- and protect yourself.

Has anyone else found their elderlies have had really bad reactions to the booster jab?

I've been having a rough few days with DM after she got her covid booster and flu jab earlier this week. She's been feverish, wobbly and unable to stand unaided some of the time, so has taken to her bed, meaning I and her cleaner-housekeeper-companion have had to be back and forth with food and drinks and commode-emptying services.

More worryingly, she has been getting very muddled and confused about things, her post-stroke aphasia (from 14 years ago) has suddenly got much worse, and she seems to be possibly having visual hallucinations. She seems perfectly compos mentis on the surface when you talk to her, so when paramedics arrived to check her over last night (I called them on GP's advice) they did not see any major cause for concern, but then every so often she will come out with something totally off the wall or will struggle to read/dial a phone number, or get totally the wrong word for something and not realise, even after repeating it emphatically several times. I am wondering when I need to ask if this is not just post-vaccine side effects, but possibly a triggering/exacerbation of pre-existing cognitive issues.

I don’t know about elderlies, I’m having a bad time. Headache, fever, joint pain.

I think you’ll need just have to wait and see. If it’s the vaccine it should clear, if the vaccine has triggered a decline, it’ll persist. I’d give it a full week.

Hope you're feeling a bit brighter by now Dint

My mother has just called me and instigated a conversation about hookers, phone sex and hand jobs.

I shit you not...

God Minty I couldn’t cope with the intensity of your DM’s drama, I really couldn’t, you are a saint to put up with it. Do you have MH support for yourself, have you considered any support counselling or ways of focusing on care for you? I know counselling isn’t for everyone, and it’s expensive. I’ve got a person-centred counsellor at the moment who is helping me a lot.

That must be upsetting Hairbrush but you aren’t guilty of anything. You have done everything possible for your DM. My DM will also never stop wanting the impossible which is for her to be well and my DF to be alive and for them to be young again. There’s a poem by Charles Causely called Eden Rock which captures some of that sadness (blub warning).

That’s sad about the pictures and your Mum’s things Toofar. I also get what you mean about disposing of DM’s things while she’s still here Knot - I did a lot of swithering before composting the houseplants (not suitable for her to take to the care home) but she also rejects things I suggest she could have in the care home, including photos etc.

I could cope with the mouse Nota but not the incontinence denial. That’s an aspect of DM’s life I never had to get involved with and I resolved I never would. Happy to take a place on the Bad Daughter’s Bench for that.

Agh, that sounds hard Temporary.

MrsR as someone once addicted to alcohol who doesn’t drink, all my sympathies are with you while also understanding where your DM is. Not all drinkers stop, many don’t, because it’s too hard, and that decline has to be managed (in a civilised society) but you don’t have to do that – it’s why we all pay our various taxes. Is it possible for your DM to have care visits (public or private depending on what she qualifies for)? If she’s resisting then hey ho she has a choice to at least do that.

Good news exexpat!

I’m in a new phase with DM where it’s all about the care home relationship. Her home, like most others, is undergoing staffing problems, experienced staff have left because of the vaccine requirement and others are just ill or burnt out and can get more congenial jobs. They had problems recruiting a new manager too although that was resolved but I get the impression that they are operating in a new world – they are a relatively ‘high-end’ home and have I think previously sailed sedately along. I say impression because we relatives still can’t go inside. IMO this mindset needs to change – there are worse things than the risk of Covid for tripple-jabbed very elderly people.

I’m still travelling there monthly and seeing DM under the Covid regime – I’ve managed to take her out (not to her house, as warned against on here) a few times, always with someone else and I think it really needs two people. I’m in the process of finding a care agency to take DM out when I’m not there (appointments etc. hopefully maybe more), a couple have said they can do that. DM is still frail, still mildly demented and still self-absorbed and that is only going to go one way. I can’t believe how I’d be doing now if the previous pre care-home situation was still going on, at a time when work is hellish busy, although I can still get stressed about arrangements, it’s getting better.

Peacocks All! Dint I hope you’re feeling better.

Hello. I have very elderly in-laws and my MIL in particular is very frail. FIL is probably classed as that too now as he had a fall and broke his hip last week.

He was MIL's main carer and did an amazing job of looking after her. I suppose when you've been married for 68 years, you take that as part of the deal.

DH and I are looking after MIL and trying to organise some care for the pair of them. As you can imagine out of hours social workers aren't wildly helpful although they did offer to send someone to "pop in for ten minutes or so just to check on her" which is frankly, less than useless. She can't be left alone and we can't provide proper care at the level she needs. FIL was struggling but it seems that since Covid kicked off, he's hidden a few things like her continence issues, from us. They're both very independent, FIL especially, as see accepting help as weakness.

I'm also worried that the hospital will try to discharge him before he's mobile - MIL broke her hip last April and was home within a week. I know Covid meant that they just wanted her out before she contracted it and we were on board with that, but we were told she was using her Zimmer well - she wasn't - and that physio would be organised - couldn't get physio for love nor money. And at that time, we couldn't even go into the house to make sure that she was doing her exercises. Consequently, MIL has very limited mobility, even with the Zimmer. To take her from sitting room to bedroom, about 25 feet, she uses a wheelchair. The thought that FIL might come home with similar problems is a worry.

I feel like a need a space on the Bad Daughter's Bench because I want to find a home for her, just for a few weeks while we get the house sorted and get some care organised although I feel as though we should manage alone - we're lucky that we're self-employed and very flexible.
But just the last few days has left me feeling exhausted and overwhelmed.

We live 20-some miles from them and so we're constantly dashing between here and there in shifts. We also have a dog that we can't take there because he's very hairy and MIL has a genetic form of COPD so enormous fluffy dogs aren't ideal around her, so he's spending a lot of time with a couple of our (amazing) neighbours.

I just feel over-whelmed and tearful and drowning in a sea of not knowing what to do for the best for them. I love my in-laws very much but I'm really not sure we can make what they want - to be at home together - happen. And I feel guilty for feeling slightly resentful that my life, already restricted by the fact that we're their only family, is now going to be entirely focussed on their needs.

Hence why I'm rambling here at 4am! Thanks for letting come and sit with you for a bit. It's comforting to know it's not just me and to read the posts of more seasoned campaigners.

Burningthetoast If the IL's have been flying under the radar then social services don't know they exist and they may have hidden reality from their doctor. It is probably time to burst the bubble of denial. MIL is a vulnerable adult at risk (the risk factors may include falling, not eating, leaving the gas on, not locking doors, immobility) and someone needs to ask social services to do a needs assessment for MIL. FIL should get his own as part of the hospital discharge. I think here the GP can refer to the incontinence service, if his parents haven't already given authority for him to talk to their doctor then this would be a good start (also a key safe so the hypothetical carers can let themselves in)

When mum came out of hospital respite care was a godsend because it gave me a week to breathe and it gave her a chance to see what it was like to be looked after. It is a brutal time but if there is a chance to make some changes that means their lifestyle is sustainable without a major family sacrifice, it's now. I often say here that it takes a crisis for change to happen. Is MIL capable of making a decision for a couple of weeks repite care until her husband comes home?

Be kind to yourself, if you're not sleeping (and 3.58am says not) that alone can make you weepy. It's not about what you should be doing but what you are able to do. This is a marathon, not a sprint. There are things that you can do for a week by setting the rest of your life aside but they are not sustainable in the long term. Hopefully you and your husband are on the same page because it's even harder if not.

Thanks, Minty and Binary, feeling fine now - it all cleared yesterday morning and I find it was less then 24hours. Didn’t feel like that when it was happening!

Binary and Toast you’re out of date! The bad daughters’ bench has been thrown out and replaced by a whole room. We had capacity issues.

Shocked, Binary that you’re still not allowed inside the care home. I’m feeling cross that ours is required to close every time a carer tests positive, it seems to me that the only thing changed in that situation is the risk of outward transmission, the risk of inward transmission, from visitor to residents and staff, hasn’t changed, so why ban visitors? But apart from that, I can see dad for an hour at a time in his room. By appointment, so I go only once a week.

Toast of course you need a home! The reason care homes keep people healthy is that, despite staff shortages, they do have staff, and those staff have time off each day and whole days off each week. You can’t replicate that. You wouldn’t even be able to it if you lived with them. The fact you’re thinking of it suggests you need to search out the Good Daughters Room behind the stairs. (There hasn’t been much call for it, so-we haven’t got round to decorating and furnishing it yet)

Yes imagining the Good daughters' room as a cobwebby space swathed in furniture covers and the door so rarely used it sticks a bit in the frame...

I had a wonderful day off yesterday with newish bf and am lucky to get that sort of break with my sister stepping in to visit DM. But a desperate call from the ward phone by Mum around 5pm saying she'd somehow got herself into hospital and how long would she have to wait tonight until I came to get her? I don't blame her for feeling terrible as she's been in hospital well over a month now. But it did send me into a tailspin. The worst though is that this is inevitably going to keep going when she is in a nursing home - I just hope at least there there will be a calmer environment and more distractions like TV, a bath from time to time, places to wander.

I wish so much that she had died. This is no life.

Hello all. Glad you feel better @MereDintofPandiculation. That must have flattened you for a while.
toast welcome to the very well populated bad daughters suite with every comfort possible ….
And cockroach and cocktail to all..

Afternoon all - do the Bad Daughters have a uniform, like The Handmaid's Tale?
I should be sewing but I've just got a new book (I say book, it's a novella) out and I'm waiting for some bugger to review it. I haven't actually finished writing anything since 2020 so it's quite a big thing for me to have it released at last.
Sort of on that note, it's funny when I re-read my own books, how my main character - who is very much from a dysfunctional family - has spent most of the series building for themself a conventional and blisteringly dull home life. I dunno, it's almost like I set out to write my own wish fulfilment fantasy and just happened to drag my fictional characters into it to do it for me.....

Can DH join as a Bad Son? Not sure how he would look in a Handmaids Tale type outfit though ?

He is trying hard (and failing) to calm down after a short visit to MIL.

Things have been a lot better since she was prescribed medication but it's still a bit bumpy. We have discovered that she is on Risperidone which appears to be quite a heavy duty anti-psychotic drug. She says she has no idea why it has been prescribed but she seems to know that she must take it.

We have had some sensible conversations about Christmas presents from her to DS (her only DGC) and I am organising it all, but she keeps nagging and fussing about it. DH went over to try and go through where we are to reassure her, then she suddenly started up with the accusations again and she was trying to physically prevent him from leaving, he's got bruises on his back! He feels very shaken by it, her behaviour is just so unhinged.

Minty sorry but the subject matter of your DMs phone call made me 😳, sorry too that L is back in favour. It's just such a bloody emotional roller coaster.

Dint glad you're feeling better again.

Afternoon all - do the Bad Daughters have a uniform, like The Handmaid's Tale? Oh, goodness no! Wear what you like, from your oldest comfortable casuals to your poshest dress that you'd wear if you ever got the chance for a good night out. Did I tell you, someone "complimented" me recently for my "style - retro-eclectic". Such a nice way of saying "you wear old clothes that don't match"

TonTon Yes, I'm sure we would welcome a bad son. Is he into cushions, warm throws, gin, chocolate and good coffee?

Have you seen the note on the NICE page for Risperidone that it is confused with Ropinerole?

Oh my Lord TonTon! Physical attack is a new one??

So today my mother made it out of the hospital without anyone noticing. The staff were racing around and security checking CCTV but no joy. She was eventually found in the car park with bruises and grazes from a fall.

I'm honest, I just feel sorry for the hospital team trying to do their jobs with minimal staffing and my mum's total determination to elude them...

Hello again - didn't meant to dump all my 4am worries and run away but as you can imagine life's pretty chaotic.

FIL has his op yesterday - it wasn't a hip as thought but a spiral fracture of his femur. Saw the surgeon, all went well, today the physios will have him up on his feet.

I spent about an hour chatting to him about The Future and how we're going to have to manage tthings. DH was at home with his mum and to be honest, DFIL tends to listen to me more, he insists on perceiving my husband's suggestions as criticisms. The Great Please Stop Using A Chainsaw Not That You're 90 And A Bit Doddery Incident of 2020 was particularly memorable.

Anyway, I digress. FIL will not consider a care home. Just won't. We can't make him (we can't, he has capacity) and he says that if we do he'll just walk out. He and MIL want to be at home together. He was at boarding school in the war and it was pretty grim and I suspect he thinks a care home would be the same. He ran away from school several times so he has form for absconding!

So I changed tack and pointed out some of the things they either are struggling with (keeping up with cleaning) and/or will find trickier given his accident (helping MIL to use a commode, cooking etc). And I asked how he thought the best way to manage that is.

The plan that DH and I came up with, and that he's agreed with, is that DH and I are going to rent a house near them. We currently live 20ish miles away and if the bridge traffic is bad that can take an hour or more. There's no real possibility of popping in two or three times a day just to keep an eye on them.

We'll be able to visit daily and so on and be close by if say, one of them has a fall. And he's agreed to have a key safe in case anyone else needs to get in. He's agreed that he will let us take some of the domestic load by organising gardeners and that if necessary he will allow a cleaner. I did make clear that I am not that cleaner - my own house is neglected enough already. We'll also be able to cook for them a bit more and he's agreed to a phyio going to the house a couple of times a week to work on their mobility.

They would have to self fund care home places and I can see why he baulks at £15k a month to do that for both of them. That will buy in a lot of assistance. And they will be at home, together, which is what they want and we want them to be happy.

The downside is that I have to find a house to rent in short order, that we'll have to finish the refurb of our house from a distance and there's a possibility that we'll never actually get to live in it again. Which is a shame but you know, moaning about moving to a nice house in the city feels a bit like complaining my diamond shoes are too tight when I consider how difficult things are for some people. There is a small upside in that our son quite likes the idea of us living in the city centre - he's in charge of our flat hunt it seems - and has indicated that he would probably be at home more if we were no longer living in the sticks with crappy broadband and not a hipster coffee shop in sight. So swings and roundabouts.

Thank you so much for listening and your support. Knowing we're not alone and that I'm not being selfish in worrying how we'll cope or wrong to feel resentful etc is really helpful.

Cripes, that was a wall of text - sorry for rambling on!

Goodness Burning that sounds like quite a conversation. And quite a heavy outcome for you. Is your FIL funding the new flat or any of these costs?

Is care really that expensive where you are BurningtheToast? My mother has just moved to nursing care and I coughed a bit at £1050 a week. I am glad you've managed to have A Talk and get some recognition that things need to change.

I think it's a really good idea to outsource as much of the work as possible as soon as possible, I'd be getting a cleaner/housekeeper now because as time goes by and this crisis fades from memory it will be harder to do it. If they have someone in the house to clean floors it is a small step to having someone going in to help with personal care. The issue is having the stranger in the house, the garden is less of a personal space. Better it being a squad of employees each doing a little work than one person collapsing under the load of little jobs. It's also future proofing the setup and it means that if you suddenly have a broken leg (or a holiday) there's someone there to step in. It also means that you have everything in place for any future crisis.

It will be interesting to see what your son comes up with, do let us know whether he gets you a fourth floor flat with great views and no lift above the hipster coffee shop and bistro.

Blimey, Toast, that’s more than I’d be prepared to do for my parents! It’s lovely that you’re doing that.

I think you need to put in some arrangements that don’t involve visiting daily. Think about times you want to go away for a few days, times when you’re ill, times when you simply could do without the daily visit. You’re slightly better off in that there are two of them so hopefully each could act as an alarm system for the other.

Don’t let your caring reach a level that you are not able to enjoy being a daughter

Very true, knot about a cleaner being more of an issue re personal space. DH wants to get one, and I’m really struggling with the idea. He wants to get used to having someone in before we've completely lost control of the situation, so I’m going to have to get used to it.

Wow @BurningTheToast that is a pretty huge outcome.

I can only echo really what Knot and Dint have said about putting things in place sooner rather than later, and honestly I would strongly advise against the daily visits unless it's essential in the short term.

I live about 3 minutes round the corner from my mum, and whilst in theory it's much easier, in practice it simply means the expectations are much higher because I'm on the doorstep and it's so much easier to call me than to get anyone else in.

And as for the visits...it's doesn't take long for popping in to becomes 'what do you mean you can't come tomorrow' and 'are you going already, you've barely been here five minutes' after 3 hours.

Think about how you want your life to look a year or two from now in relation to their care needs and get your boundaries in place from the outset, because its virtually impossible to do later.

I think your ILs are extremely lucky Burning that you and your family are prepared to make such a big upheaval to enable them to stay at home.

The barrier of getting them to accept help in the home is enormous but once it has been breached and they have nice friendly people, that they have got to know, popping in regularly it does lighten the burden for you.

Have you seen the note on the NICE page for Risperidone that it is confused with Ropinerole?

that doesn't fill one with much confidence!

DH has been feeling really guilty that they prescribed Risperidone and was afraid that this is because he exaggerated MILs symptoms, this physical attack has at least proved to him that he hasn't.

Sorry, TonTon I was in two minds as to whether to mention it.

Thanks all. Those are really good points about getting the help in early so that they're less resistant. Adding it once he's feeling better will be harder.

And yes, noted re the managing our own contribution and setting boundaries. Both DH and I are people who are practical and get things done (albeit in my case with some middle-of-the-night panics) and it will be too easy to just do everything ourselves.

Also @Knotaknitter - yup, that's what care would cost for two of them up here. About £1850 a week each.