Cockroach cafe 🪳 Spring 2022 🪳

[MereDintofPandiculation]

Welcome! Those of you who have been before will notice the Bad Daughters’ Room is now called the Kumquat Room, and there are a couple of fine kumquats in the Conservatory.

Check also the Stationery cupboard with, among other things, the 🪳emoticon ready to cut and paste.

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 🪳 mes amis/amies, and may you all live to fight another day.

@Fantasea presumably it makes no sense for her to move to a terraced house if she is future proofing - other than to have you at her beck and call? Is there scope for downstairs bathroom and bedroom? Not all the terraces in street where I live have downstairs wc. Also would she have access problems - stairs at front and back etc? Could you look on Zoopla and show her a bungalow which would work better? I know she wants proximity but if you make it all about her rather than about you she might reconsider?

Fantasea, you have my every sympathy. My dad moved closer to us, albeit still a 10minute walk. But I'm an only child and seeing my friends deal with the machinations of golden siblings I am glad for that at least, as I had a bit of a say in what properties he considered. However he is very manipulative and likes to make himself look big by making others (usually me) appear small. I get the cantankerous soandso but to everyone else he's all hail fellow well met. Anyway, what helped me was being candid about how hard I found him with my friends and neighbours before he moved in. I realised that they had already got to know the real me over time and their opinion of me wouldn't change on his say so. So if he does bump into them or is at our house when they drop in they know to basically "smile & nod".
Be firm with your boundaries and compartmentalise a lot.

I've caught up finally and sorry for anyone who's had yet more crises.
It's been all quiet here recently with parents..Mum is still in temporary CH. still packed as she thinks she'll be coming 'home'. Dad is managing his catheter but insists he wants the bag attached to his calf but the tube isn't long enough and should be on his thigh..But no...calf it is and then he gets my DB to visit as he's sore.
But devastatingly my SIL had a brain hemorrhage on Friday on the way to visit my DM, and is in hospital very poorly.. Please God give my family a break..
Sending gin to you all and a proper Cornish cream tea too!

@Marylou62 my dad attaches the bag to his calf, the district nurse/company that supplies the catheter stuff can deliver a longer tube and a bag with a strap for this purpose, definitely ask for this as the soreness is horrible and they don't need to be dealing with it

FIL is face in hospital. He was discharged Wednesday evening with covid that he had picked up in hospital. Carers found him.on the floor, incoherent and evidently there for some time. It's the covid. We have been advised to visit this evening.

It's not covid after all. He is testing negative now. It's sepsis so not much better.

@Marylou62 DH has bag strapped somewhere around knee so it dangles down calf.

another useful thing is a strap or something to hold it in place just below where it emerges from the penis, stops it swinging and abrading the penis

Well, so much for our grand hopes of DM enjoying the final phase of her life in a lovely sheltered housing block. I have just given notice on her flat, which we have been paying for for six months, but she spent less than a month there and has otherwise been in hospital and nursing home. She is now bed-bound and catheterised, and we have had to admit there is no way she will ever be able to go back to the flat.

And we really can't carry on paying for nursing home plus sheltered flat plus all the running costs of the original family house, which is waiting for me to finish DF's probate and a massive clear-out of stuff before it can be sold.

So now I have to move everything back out of the flat again - charity collection for some of it, I hope, but the nicer bits will go back to the family home and be consigned to auction with all the other antiques.

Also to Countrygirl and Marylou, going through difficult times with people in hospital. How are your DF and SIL doing?

FIL has indicated he doesn't want further treatment so they are making him comfortable and waiting for nature to take it's course. I can't blame him he has been in constant pain with daily vomiting. He has such a long list of issues they just can't balance them now. At least we got MIL into a nice nursing home and she has settled in well. I feel sorry for DS2 who lives abroad and is coming over next month for a wedding. He didn't get to dad's funeral due to travel restrictions.

@countrygirl99 thinking of your FIL and hope he's comfortable. So sad for you and DS2, having to miss his DF's funeral and now all this. Life is cruel .

@exexpat oh dear, having to clear the flat again after making all those arrangements is really not what you need Xx

DM has not mentioned the house buying since dropping her bombshell last Thursday and neither have I. It is the enormous elephant in the room. The more I think about it now I feel calmer is just how sad I feel about her deceiving me like this, and what it really says about how she values me, she literally doesn't care. She thinks she can do exactly what she wants and everyone will leap into action to cheerfully assist 🙄.

Sigh... Got called a deceitful b for asking my dad to sign a consent form so that I can speak to their housing association about outstanding repairs.. apparently this indicates we are ALL trying to put them in a home.... 2 minutes later no acknowledgement at all that she'd screamed in my face and called me names.. all professionals still calling this 'normal'

@exexpat I feel your pain, I'm only here for a bijou rant-ette on the matter of flat clearances.

I've stood back from clearing mother's on grounds that the belongings she wants to keep in there are minimal and the rest is just hoarded sh*te - old magazines, broken toys, a dead microwave etc. (Not to mention the mattress soaked in bodily fluids.) I've told her and the nursing home that she needs to get someone in to do a house clearance, that I'm happy to go in with that person and direct them as to what's to be cleared out.
Guess what - she's got to have the place cleared by Monday and she's done NOTHING.
Oh wait no, she's contacted her old next door neighbour from forty years back, who now lives almost four hour's drive away, and they've come down and driven her over to the flat ... and she's collected some random bits of tat.

As the young people say, I am FUMING. I'm tempted to just go "meh" and leave the letting agent to get a skip and charge her for it. The only two things stopping me are that she has cupboards full of food which could be donated to a food bank and someone get the use of - and they're all perfectly good tins and packets as I went through her cupboards at the beginning of the year throwing out the out of date stuff - and things like family photos and musical instruments shouldn't just go to the dump.

So between a rock and a hard place, here :-(

FIL has gone.

@countrygirl99 So sorry 🌺

Oh @countrygirl99 I am so sorry.

@countrygirl99 I am sorry, all endings are hard. At least MIL was settled before this happened, easier for all that way rather than trying to sort that at the same time as FIL's death.

💐 @countrygirl99

DH is going to the home in the morning to tell her. He's dreading it but much better that yhsn a member of staff she doesn't really know well. Of course the rise in cases means visits are limited to one person so he had to do it alone.

Thanks everyone for your kind thoughts. He was a stubborn, cantankerous old sod but it's going to be quiet without him to moan about

I’m so sorry@countrygirl99. 🌺🌺🌺
such a hard thing for dh to have to do.

@countrygirl99 thinking of you all

Just checking in to say hello, and hugs for those who need them at the moment, especially @countrygirl99 .

DM's house sale finally and suddenly went through while I was out of the country on holiday. It has left me feeling very sad, not least of all because of the amount of things I had to take to the dump in the end having spent weeks trying to sell or give things away.

She was back in hospital at the weekend, following what the care home called 'a funny turn'. For the first time it was DB that had to do the answering of questions about her meds etc, rather than me. So we are firmly in the next phase of this part of her life, and I am not at all comfortable with stepping back (but I will stay stepped back, as I recognise that is my conditioning talking.)

Sorry for your loss @countrygirl99 ...I hope all goes as best it can for your DH this morning. It's a horrible thing to have to do in any circumstances.

@MrsRussell good luck with getting everything sorted. Could you just go and collect the food for donation and personal effects and then, as you say, skip everything else or get a house clearance firm in? Don't forget to arrange to do something nice for yourself (with your phone off) once it's done!

Actually Minty it was lovely - I did an hour yesterday and it wasn't as awful as I had feared. The worst thing about it was that the bin bags I'd brought were my garden tidying bags and one of my malevolent cats had peed in them in the garden, which stinks....

Four bags to go to the food bank on Friday morning, and I'd posted on my local community FB page that her freezer was full of unopened bags of food and ready meals, and within half an hour I'd had a message from someone saying could she have them - just started a new job, three young children, husband's been made redundant - so that was lovely. Mum will be pleased with that too. Turns out it's a young family we actually know, which is a bit sad, because I'd not known they were struggling.

Panini press is going to my office where we will all have the use of it, likewise her plants, those that she doesn't want. DS wants to learn to play the saxophone, so that will stay here.
Found some of mum's old diaries and binned the bloody lot unread.

I was going to go over and see her this weekend but this bloody cold is just hanging around and it doesn't seem fair, even if I'm testing flamboyantly negative, to go and sneeze all over some frail elderly people. Bit sad that I couldn't find a home for the slow cooker but we have one already, so.

Know what you mean about the curmudgeonly old s*d @countrygirl99, my dad was the same. Hope it went smoothly this morning for DH.