Cockroach cafe Winter 2025

[GnomeDePlume]

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/elderly_parents/5360173-cockroach-cafe-summer-2026?page=39&reply=147870717

Here we go. I think we are going to need this

Glad you got her back okay @Dormit through the weather yesterday. It makes sense now why everyone expects you to do all the caring with you being a nurse, although it shouldn't be that way. Shame your sister couldn't just help practically with something as simple as driving your Mum home seeing as you do so much. Good that the carers are back in today so that you can rest at home.

Another visit with DM yesterday (I go every Sunday). As is normal now she didnt really know who I was. Still, we were able to do a few things which kept her happy with me being there. But I know she is just marking time waiting for DB to appear (he doesnt trust CH staff to get DM to bed without supervision).

Second dementia assessment this week. Assuming the diagnosis is dementia then I think the CH will want to move DM to their secure dementia unit. DM's behaviour is getting more angry and aggressive.

DB doesnt want this but I have pointed out that we dont really get a choice. If we arent happy then the only alternative will be to move DM to another CH. Doesnt bother me in the practical sense as I drive. DB doesnt drive, current CH is in his town and he can get there by bus. Alternatives will likely be in a different town, far less convenient for him.

DB was very happy that one of the CH staff was using the Mo Lift without its strap. DB thought this was great as DM doesnt like the strap. What DB thought would happen if DM slipped I dont know. I could see her ending up with CH staff grabbing at her and at best ending up with ripped clothes, at worst with fractures.

For an intelligent man DB can be remarkably stupid.

The CH staff must love DB turning up every night to supervise 🙄

@Isitsticky I will be honest and say I am beyond caring. If this is what DB wants to do then he can crack on. I am not going to be standing in for him at any point. If this means DM/DB/CH get a bad night then so be it.

That's exactly the right attitude @GnomeDePlume

You've made your very reasonable boundaries known to all concerned.

Your brother is going to struggle enormously if your mother is either moved to the other unit or moved to a different CH (and of course he'll disintegrate mentally very seriously when she dies).

Oh, I don't mean to suggest you should give it any thought yourself. Let him crack on. It's good that you have your boundaries.

@TheBroonOneAndTheWhiteOne I am worried about how DB will cope. I think he is now reconciled to the idea that DM has dementia. The next step will be reconciling him to the idea that this will likely result in changes for DM. He finds even the smallest change very difficult.

In the end, if the CH say DM needs to move then DB will probably make a lot of noise then not actually do anything about it. I am not going to make arrangements for DM to move CH unless the current CH say they can no longer meet her needs.

DD made an interesting observation about DB. He has never had much to do with small children. He hasnt the experience of using distraction techniques. When DM gets caught in a temper squall he tries to reason or explain her out of it. This doesnt work with toddlers and doesnt work with DM.

Following the Contented Dementia book advice, so far as is possible I just go along with whatever DM wants. If she wants to get her coat and 'go home', we head back to her room. So far, by the time we have got there she has forgotten that she wants out.

DM is finally being discharged from hospital tomorrow, into a care home - the plan is that this should be for 6 weeks to allow her to recover from breaking her collar bone when she fell in hospital (the lengths we had to go to for the break to be diagnosed makes a long and sorry tale that i am currently writing a complaint to PALS about) and the delirium she now has. She has been in hospital for over 3 weeks now. The care home seems very nice and I really hope she can improve. About to go and label some clothes and put them in a suitcase for her.

Thankfully, DF is not insisting on going with her, but he will want to visit every day, as he has been at the hospital. Guess who's been facilitating that? On the one hand, i don't want to make such a difficult time for them about me. On the other, I want my life back and I don't want to be spending 3-4 hours a day visiting. On the plus side, DB said he will come and stay with DF soon to take some of the pressure off me 'for as long as needed' - he did laugh when I said, 'what? 10 years?' - but I do see the whole situation stretching out interminably.

@NDornotND I am glad you have been able to spring your DM from hospital. I hope the CH means she can get the rest and recuperation she needs.

The CH atmosphere will be a lot calmer than a hospital ward. They will also pay a lot more attention to what your DM is eating and drinking.

I dont know what the official cause of hospital delirium is but I do think that lack of sleep and dehydration play a huge part.

How much delirium becomes permanent will depend on the individual. I do feel that a couple of longer hospital stays booted my DM's dementia down the road quite quickly.

I hope you are able to rope in your DB to help. Daily visits are a killer.

@NDornotNDis there a solution you can suggest for your DF to visit your DM daily that doesn’t involve you - or at least not every day?

I feel a lot of the time for me the issue is that when the emergency happens a solution is devised that works for a short term , but then the elderly DP quickly defaults to seeing that as the norm and doesn’t appreciate the level of input required to make it happen, and then it feels a bit churlish to push back when people are not in the best of health. Unfortunately it does have to be done to keep your own energy and mental health levels reasonable.

My mum also seems more confused since coming out of hospital. It’s not helped that they haven’t put her paracetamol in her dosette box and she’s getting confused and not taking it on time. I’ve asked the GP to assess for dementia now. There’s always an excuse of having a lot on her mind or her medication but the only thing she has is appointments because everything else is done for her. She’s become quite passive again and I’m getting irritable and then feel guilty. She’s got Alexa reminders for her medication but she didn’t take them still this morning. No matter how much I go through it with her it doesn’t go in and there’s no reason other than cognitive decline. The latest excuse for not getting things is having a bit of a cold. A snuffly nose does not cause memory or processing issues.

@Dormit your mum's responses and behaviour sound very familiar to me: they're very typical of people who are starting to have a decline in cognition.

I have a feeling that the excuses your mum comes up with are given because she knows jolly well that she's forgetting things and she realises that this worries you, so she has to find a reason for the forgetfulness even though it doesn't actually make sense (having a slight cold, for example, which as you rightly say, does not cause one to forget to take medication).

But she has to say something. I think she maybe feels a bit "put on the spot".

Pharmacies rarely put the right medication into dosette boxes IME. They always manage to miss things out. Maybe it's because pain relief is "as required" so shouldn't be classed as regular medication (even if the patient does in fact take it regularly).

I had a car crash today, clearly the other driver's fault, even the police officer attending said so. Thankfully both of us basically ok though he was still on the ambulance when my boss drove me home. I have quite a few bruises and a swollen hand and my car will almost certainly be written off as both of its airbags deployed. Other driver was apparently 88 years old. I am so very thankful that my DF is no longer driving.

Crikey @Mumbles12 I hope you recover quickly💐. Was it one of those 'just not looking and seeing' situations? My DM was getting very unreliable when she stopped. I suspect her eyesight was much worse than she was letting on plus her reaction times were geological.

@Dormit in hindsight the first indications of DM's cognitive decline were when she stopped being able to engage with technology. Things she had been quite capable of using suddenly 'stopped working'. Reminders no longer reminded as she didnt recognise the sounds.

The day DM moves to the secure dementia unit within her CH is looming closer. Yesterday DB found DM on another floor, upset and confused. I made some facts plain to DB yesterday:

• without diagnosis and possibly DoLo DM cant be stopped from going where she wants including out of the front door.
• DM is not paying for 1 to 1 care so the CH cant dedicate a member if staff to keep tabs on her
• the CH is not a secure hospital with people being buzzed in and out. There would be hell to pay if other residents had their liberty curtailed to keep DM from roaming

No reply to this from DB so far.

That's very well put @rookiemere I've become trapped in this cycle myself. There were a series of emergencies when DF was very ill, when I put everything else on hold to make sure DM could visit him in hospital every day and then spent a lot of time helping them when he came home. Then DF passed away so of course I dropped everything to be with DM to support her and manage the practical arrangements. Since then, every time I've tried to take a step back there has been some sort of crisis of worsening of health that makes it more difficult. I find it's not just DM who now sees this as he norm but also family/friends/HCP etc. I don't think it helps that initially I was very careful not to make DM/DF feel bad about asking for help when they needed it, so I pretended everything was no trouble.
I'm finding that for my own sanity I have to keep reiterating that I work and have other commitments so although I have been able to prioritise DMs needs in the short term I now have a backlog of other things that urgently need my attention. In many ways this is made more difficult because I am self employed and work flexibly so as far as DM is concerned because I CAN take her calls/visit her etc during the day that means I am 'free' in the working day. It's very difficult to get her to see that if I spend time during the day doing things for/with her (or taking multiple long phone calls about her latest gripe eg. her view on the fact that their bin day has changed) that means I will have to work through the evenings and weekends. I've found that I have to be almost brutally honest, and to set aside specific work times that I will not move in order for people to even consider that I might not be available at all times. Even then I get challenged- eg. My brother made a nasty comment this week about the fact that I rarely visit DM at the weekends, whereas he has her over for Sunday lunch every week (giving up his time even though he WORKS all week). When I replied that nowadays I have to work at least one full day at the weekend to make up for time spent with DM during the week this was dismissed as 'excuses'.

@Mumbles12 I am glad you are okay. We had to take DF keys away after DH got in a car with him and it was clear his peripheral vision was impaired as he narrowly missed some parked vehicles. This was before he got his macular degeneration diagnosis so no one had picked up how bad it actually was and told him not to drive. He isn't allowed a licence now. It is scary to think how many elderly are out there driving while impaired either visually or cognitively.

It is a good point @rookiemere and @bigbootsweather whenever DF gets unwell with his breathing we go up there more frequently and DH will often go up to help him to bed later at night. Once he starts improving he phones and phones expecting that to continue even if told earlier in the day that no one is coming. Last night I was on a train to London and DH was on his own with the kids, he was still phoning despite being told 2 hours earlier that no one was coming. His carer came in 9.30-10pm so it wasn't that he didn't see anyone either.

@Mumbles12 hope you’re ok.

The driving question is so difficult. Dad was told not to drive after his stroke until the doctor said ok, but after a while I think Dad realised himself that he wasn’t safe to drive again ever, even though he was otherwise recovered. Dad was always quite realistic about the physical aspects of getting old.

Mum has macular degeneration but said the optician said she was ok to drive in the early days. She was only ever popping to the local shops so I wasn’t too worried until the day she misjudged going round a parked car, hit it and wrote off her own car. Thankfully no one hurt as she wasn't going fast. DB was helping her choose a new one with the insurance money until mum mentioned to me that the optician had actually told mum that she was “borderline” to drive. I told DB and between us we managed to undermine her faith in her ability to drive, as kindly as possible. Sounds a bit cruel now, but she came to the decision herself and decided the insurance money would pay for quite a few taxis. The loss of spontaneous independence still hit her though.

I’m hoping that driverless cars will be a thing by the time I’m no longer able to drive myself, although DH and I do laugh at the idea of all of us old buggers getting cross that the car can’t understand us and taking us where we don’t want to go.

The driving thing is such a worry.

I let DF 92 drive to his last but one hospital appointment with me. His driving was actually ok until I had to take over in the car park because he was getting stressed about not finding a space - this is the visit where he subsequently ended up in A&E as headed to the wrong department then tripped when I was parking the car. So yup, driving is not ideal due to his increasing but undiagnosed dementia. I have put off phoning the doctors about his condition as I suspect the first thing they will do is ask if he is still behind the wheel, and honestly I don’t have it in me to take his keys from him. I can only hope he doesn’t injure anyone else in an accident. I just wish they would implement reflex tests at the same time as eye tests and take that burden off the family.

@funnelfan I can see the computer in the driverless car combusting as we all demand to be taken to shops which are long since closed down or go and visit 'our Marjorie' who is 'just up that road' but in fact moved to Australia/died/never existed (my DM merges people in her mind).

My mum would be asking to go to the line dancing session that stopped over 2 years ago.

I don’t have it in me to take his keys from him. I can only hope he doesn’t injure anyone else in an accident

@rookiemere how will you feel if he does injure someone else though?

You need to take the keys away, if you're already thinking that an accident is possible or indeed likely.

It's essential that impaired drivers are prevented from getting behind the wheel. Only you can do this.

We are currently getting insight into the perils of living in a rural area as you age. DH had another episode on Saturday and it doesn't look like it was a hypo as blood glucose was fine 30 minutes before he left home and he ate breakfast in that 30 minutes. He set out to drive to an event an hour away, can remember driving through the next village 19 minutes away heading in the right direction then can't remember a thing before crashing in a town 30 minutes from home in the opposite direction. So now he can't drive and is having a load of tests. So far everything is normal which is more worrying. Luckily no-one else was involved in the crash but his car is a write off. Not a call I wanted to get when I wasn't even in the country.

And here's a cautionary tale which I often tell:

I used to care for a 96 year old lady who was still driving, mainly because her son filled in the forms which his mother received about her ability to drive. He lied on them and claimed that she had no medical conditions which would preclude her from driving. In fact, the lady had vascular dementia.

I decided to report this to the DVLA. They arranged for the lady to have a driving test. On the day before this was to happen, she ran someone over in the high street just around the corner from her house. She wasn't going very fast (fortunately) but she then reversed into the group of people who had left the pavement and gone to the aid of the injured woman.

Luckily, nobody was badly hurt.
The police took her car keys away on the spot and the DVLA finally stopped her from driving.

Thanks all. I am very bruised and very uncomfortable and quite cross that my car, which was worth more to me than I will get from the insurance company, has been written off through no fault of my own. I am very relieved that I wasn't a metre further on as if I had been he would have driven with force into the driver door and I think that I would be in hospital. Both airbags went off as it was quite some force.
If you have parents who you think should not be driving please do consider the difficult conversation. Whilst I feel very sorry for this old man I really hope that he never drives again as he is clearly not capable. He totally misunderstood the junction and if there were a next time of him driving he could possibly kill a pedestrian or another driver.

Awful. Was she or her lying son prosecuted? Well done to you for reporting to the DVLA.