Cockroach Café 🪳 🪳 🪳New Year 2025

[MereDintofPandiculation]

Welcome in to the Cockroach Café Bad Daughters’ Room, the rugs and cushions all fresh and clean for the new season.
Good daughters, find your way to the small room behind the stairs. Sorry it’s not as equipped as here, but it doesn’t get much use.
Come in when you want to share good news, or to rant, or just to hang out with others who understand what you're going through. The way MN works, hopefully this thread won’t appear in any featured lists, and the only people wandering in will be those who understand what it’s all about.
If you have a BIG question, it might be worth giving it its own thread, so as not to swamp this one.
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. My recent enquiries suggested more people wanted to keep the well known name than wanted to change it to something more savoury, so for the moment it stays.

@StripyMug thank you for sharing. We’ve been through this and you’ve articulated how that part felt. When sorting with siblings we found sentimental things we used to do together as siblings but, mostly, I just didn’t want anything. I wanted it to be over and I resent that I’m now storing loads of stuff (keep telling myself it won’t be forever) because we had to clear quite quickly.

Wishing you and @funnelfan strength for this part and hope you both find some treasures that bring back happy memories.

@FiniteSagacity I was just thinking that maybe the best thing to do is to stick to the facts so as not to become overwhelmed by emotions:
Mum has dementia.
She is not safe to be at home.
She is in a very comfortable care home.
She will not be living at home again.
We need to clear her house in order to rent or sell it.
We will do this in bite-sized chunks.
Hopefully this will help!

Got a text saying that she can't get on the internet. Welp, I can't go down today. Suggested she ask one of the neighbours to look at it - they're pretty helpful.
I wonder if I can set up some bomb proof remote controlled system I can just reset from here without a 3h round trip?
Locked down so a misplaced finger can't accidentally change any settings?

@StripyMug Your suggestion about dealing in facts is excellent. I shall try to employ it when getting stuck in the emotional mess of dealing with care for my Mum. Maybe with other things in life!

Gentle hugs to those of you having to start sifting houses.

@MysterOfwomanY no idea, sorry. There must be something out there, hope you find it.

After a frustrating then peculiar start, FIL’s care package seems to be working. Touching lots of wood as I type. Had a few teething troubles- used incontinence pads left in bags in the bedroom, soiled bed simply remade, wet clothes put in a drawer (!) but we seem to be getting there now.

Hello. Sorry I haven't been here for awhile. Things have been relatively okay so I try to make the most of those times. Really sorry for everyone still fighting in the trenches.

I have a weird dilemma. Be interested to hear your thoughts. There has been a spate of burglaries in mom's area. They seem to be mostly after cars. She doesn't have one.

she is dithering about getting a burglar alarm. My feeling - being brutally honest - is that it will be another thing for me to have to do and she may struggle to understand how to use it.

But also she can't get up quickly without being dizzy - so if she hears an alarm going off when she's asleep, she's going to panic. And what is she going to do to switch it off? Go down on the stair lift!? Or we would have to ask a neighbour to be an emergency call in that situation.

There are two other elderly people living alone on the same road. To be honest, when you look at the houses it's actually very obvious that those are the houses that won't have anything in them. The other houses have alarms.

Not sure what to do really. I can't see the point of a burger alarm if it will ultimately cause mum (and me) more stress. But equally I hate the thought of her coming face-to-face with a burglar.

However, the last attempted robbery was during broad daylight. Someone's got doorbell camera footage and there's actually people walking along the street while they to force the window. They were chased away by another neighbour.

I don't want to get trapped in that repeated cycle of worrying about her every five minutes. Because obviously anything could happen any time. I can see why an alarm is good but I still think she's a lower risk of burglary than others.

and where do these worries end? The two other oldies without burglar alarms arent bothered but I don't know if they know about the latest attempt.

thanks for any thoughts.

*mum not mom
autocorrect gah

hello emerald! What about a dummy box?

Absolutely heartbreaking visit to mum today - she was crying when I got there because she wanted her mum to come and pick her up and take her home. Then she said "there's no point in my life, I might as well be dead."
I did give her a hug obviously even though I really struggle with physical contact with her and reassured as best I could. She was ok when I left.
I feel torn in two - on the one hand she is a very scared and confused old lady but on the other hand she has been a manipulative, selfish, narcissistic and toxic presence in my life. I don't really know how to feel, if I'm honest! I guess there's no right or wrong?

@StripyMug be kind to yourself, first and foremost. Don’t overthink it. If a hug feels like the right thing to you then do it. If it doesn’t then don’t. It is not forgiving, forgetting, minimising what went before, it is behaving- in a moment- according to your instinct.

Re the burglar alarm, I honestly wouldn't bother. I've had one in a couple of places I've lived and it was more annoying than anything else. I've never had a centrally monitored one as those have a monthly cost. So not one that was connected to a call centre/where they'd call the police.

Whilst you can adjust the settings, I found it hard enough getting through the front door with a baby or toddler and shopping and getting it turned off - putting a number in to turn it off or on again. For someone with poor mobility, poor dexterity or any confusion it would be far harder - the buttons on the control panel weren't that big. Not an insurmountable problem but it's an extra thing to do.

We gave up setting it at night after all the problems of someone getting up to get a drink and setting it off, waking the rest of the household.

It can invalidate your home insurance if it isn't set correctly. So if she went out and didn't set it and the existence of the alarm had been declared on the insurance. That meant we were very wary of having friends/family to stay over and giving them a spare key. Could
carers etc be trusted to always set it?

It might be worth approaching your local community support person from the police. The things that seemed to make a difference were not having valuables obviously on display, not leaving windows or doors open and not having places someone could hide to approach the house eg bushes in front garden. Motion sensor lights were mentioned too.

@SockFluffInTheBath Thankyou for your wise words x

@thesandwich Dummy box, yeah that's a thought. But I suppose I'm currently thinking that her house isn't a target at present. I wonder if a dummy box would make it look like one?

@EmotionalBlackmail Interesting points about the burglar alarm hassle. She doesn't really go out without me, maybe just to pop to a neighbour or something. Re carers, at the moment she lets them in. But that's a really interesting point because moving forward she may need more care - and then we may not be able to rely on having the same carers coming so we'd be teaching a whole bunch of people an alarm code. I don't know how carers feel about dealing with alarms either.

Re lights, we discussed that today. She had the same concern as I did - that every time she sees the light flicker she'll panic and it will be a fox or a cat or something. We do get a lot of both. Also, I can't help wondering if a massive light coming on actually just makes it easier for burglars to see what they're doing!

there isn't anywhere for them to hide and there are no valuables.

Just typing this I feel like it could be stacking worry on top of worry. But I'm also thinking about if something happens, how guilty would I feel if I talked her out of it?

I had an incredibly hard time talking her into having a key box. So I have been trying to steer her away from worrying about security. But now I'm worried about it!

We won't rush into anything because after the most recent incident, I'm hoping they won't target this road again. At least not for a while. It's that classic conundrum of it being such a tough choice when you've got to look after someone who's vulnerable. I suppose the bottom line is if she really wants one I'll get it sorted. And she would have to take responsibility for the fact that it might scare her unnecessarily and there might be medical consequences for that.

They are mostly trying cars from what I can telland have not been successful because all the cars have alarms. They might have been successful this time if a neighbour hadn't chased them away. There were three of them and I presume they have some convoluted way of cracking electric locks or immobilisers.

@MysterOfwomanY you can remotely manage internet routers although it can make them more vulnerable to hacking. Make sure you have a decent internet security package installed on her computer/phone too.

https://techwiser.com/access-your-router/

@StripyMug that sounds really hard. If you don't feel like physical contact at any point you don't have to give it and go against a personal boundary, you don't have to continue to put your Mum's needs first even if she is vulnerable. Although maybe in those moments it is easier to think of her in more of her child state before all of the adult behaviours that were harmful to you began. There is no right or wrong just what you feel you want to do/give in the moment.

@SockFluffInTheBath glad things are getting easier with FIL with the care package in place.

DDad has been more confused this week. When we went there today he was sitting in front of his lunch which was uneaten just staring and had not taken some of his medication from the morning.

The iPad is FIXED.

Drove down, took her to the apple store, made an appointment, got a coffee and cake, went back to the apple store and they sorted out the iPad, wrote down stuff so I know it as well (just in case), popped into a couple of shops to look at shoes but none were right, had lunch, driving back now.

Lunch was her treat, but complicated by the fact she hadn't been out of the house for months (not counting hospital), and so the contactless card machine asked for a pin, which of course she couldn't remember. So we paid and she's just asked for my bank details to pay us back.

So not a bad day, but it did take all day. The internet problem was downstream and BT seem to have fixed it. And probably a good thousand calories went down her on the trip.

Oh and someone sent her (well, her late husband) a scam letter. Which she wasn't fooled by for a second, she's sharp, but ... Paper? Letter? How ... Retro.

Glad you got it sorted @MysterOfwomanY and that cake in good quantities was consumed by all. Good she is savvy about scam letters, that is a bit old skool by modern standards of scamming though!

checking in and glad to see @EmeraldRoulette. It sounds to me like the burglar alarm conundrum is a displacement worry. I get anxious and if the things I usually worry about are all ok then my brain searches around for something else to worry about. (At least it did before I started taking sertraline!) if it helps, car thieves don’t tend to target houses. Hope you find a solution.

another day of house sorting yesterday. Shoes and handbags. Lots of them. And every single handbag contains at least three or four items from a choice of comb, pen, paracetamol, tissues, lipstick, denture fix, nail file…. Most of the bags are very lightly used so off to the charity shop they go.

Thanks @Choconuttolata for the directions!

I think I’m going to have to sort DMs house too, despite her still living there.
Even before the Alzheimer’s she was always disorganised. Tidy on the surface - as my brother says, championship level at tidying things out of sight, never to be seen again.

She constantly loses so many things- hearing aids, hearing aid batteries , glasses, tablets, remotes, central heating controller, items of clothing, documents, you name it. Then I get a panicked call and am expected to search for things until found. Today it was bras. She doesn’t have a bra to her name apparently. (I bought her two last week).

I’ve concluded the only answer is to go minimalist. DH suggested buying a small safe and putting spares of everything in it. Only trouble is she’d probably hide the safe.

I am convinced that she had undiagnosed inattentive ADHD which is complicated now by the Alzheimer’s. She ticks all the boxes.

I know that battle with constantly losing things. I recently had to do an evening dash to screwfix for vital 2 batteries. They only had packs of 12 so I put the rest on a high shelf in a store room. This week I noticed they've vanished when I was getting something from.the shelf. Mum has no idea where they can have gone and "someone" must have moved them - she lives alone. Presumably the same "someone" who makes important reminders disappear from her notice board. Her dentures have been missing for 3 weeks. They must be somewhere in the house but "someone" must have moved them from her denture pot.

@countrygirl99 it’s driving me to despair! I realise she’s trying to retain some control over her life by sorting and tidying things into safe places but dear me.

Oh God I recognise that. My parents live in a very chaotic house because my DM has always been messy and disorganised and over the years my DF has lost the battle and so the house looks as though a bomb has hit it. In fact it often looks as though they have been burgled, with stuff everywhere and cupboard and drawers left open, but that’s normal for them. It drives me mental.
On top of that they both keep losing stuff (not surprisingly) and DF is always convinced it’s been “stolen.” I am coming to the conclusion this is cognitive decline with a side of paranoia.

DM’s phrase is ‘Why would someone do that to me?’ whenever something goes missing!

Can't help wondering now if we overdid the clearing out bit of FIL's house. Had his diagnosis been correct, he was looking at possibly a number of years in a care home, and the family were consequently preparing to sell his home ASAP to fund it, all with FIL's consent. As it was, he only had a couple of months left to live, and no sooner had the sale of valuable items been arranged than he was on his deathbed. Which feels a bit ghoulish now, with the solicitor asking questions about the proceeds. I presume they have to do this in case he had gold bars under the bed or something, but no chance. It won't go anywhere near the IHT threshold, which is what I assume they're looking at, otherwise we all have to be super careful about throwing out Auntie Jean's sideboard and the knick-knacks inside it.

I’m currently waiting for an ambulance for DM who has fallen and possibly (hope not ) fractured her hip. Current estimate is 4 hours. She can’t remember how or when she fell. I have her on cushions and pillows on the floor wrapped in blankets. SIL is an ambulance technician on the other side of the country so he is keeping me advised on what to do.