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

Not aware of them. We are in the furthest north part of the country so very few options here usually.

She was in a lot of pain if she tried to move. Thank goodness they are treating her for the UTI she still has unlike the GP who went yesterday and didn’t even take a urine sample off her when I told them she was behaving out of character and had finished her antibiotics for another UTI the day before. A&E have certainly been on the ball today and are taking good care of her after nobody gave her pain relief overnight. She was on a corridor overnight and couldn’t get the attention of anybody to help her. We’ve got a brand new upgraded A&E department with individual rooms for the majors which gives privacy. Much improved on the layout when I worked there. No windows though which sucks for the staff. I’ve no idea if they will give her a brace. They didn’t last time when she did a similar thing and fractured her spine on the wardrobe. That was only one vertebrae though and this is four so they might.

Sounds very tough for the near future for multiple posters here.

Kudos to you all for keeping going.

We’ve had a ton of snow which brings with it new / more stresses.

Weather won’t ease up for days.

Frustrating but kind of glad of the forced rest as work is already ramping up even though I’m not officially back til Monday…

DGM knows to be careful outside but has had a few slips recently even without cold weather factors so not looking forward to what might go on.

Neighbours being stuck in will hopefully mean they can sort anything she needs though.

I’ll message them before bed so they see it in the morning.

My diet and rest has improved so much the past couple of days from no driving or stressful dealings showing me that I definitely need to push the care aspect as I can’t go on as I have been.

No one (neighbour or family friend or even family) wants to take her out in the car unless it’s an emergency because of how difficult she is.

One of the issues with the social work is that the guy that came to the house before (when dealing with DGF’s end of life) was african… unfortunately she has opinions and they aren’t nice ones!

Will see what I can find online about contacting them as it was the hospital or GP that did it before.

Also need to have an awkward chat with the GP receptionist as I’d asked to book an app to get a dr’s note regarding DGM’s existing conditions to go towards her blue badge and was told I don’t need one and to just submit it without however a colleague with experience said no I will need to provide…

On a different note- there’s a supermoon tonight. It’s pretty nice with the snowy backdrop :)

@Dormit, sorry to hear about your DM, I hope she is a bit more comfortable now while they make a plan. So unfortunate that it happened just as she had got home and was on the mend.

@bigbootsweather I hope this week ahead will be a reality check for your DB so that things get easier.

DF home today thanks to DH alone as I was at work. DB despite promises to help was a no show today and the excuses kept changing as to why he couldn't come. I anticipate he won't show tomorrow either, leaving us to juggle work, kids going back to school and DF.

Hospital also messed up and sent DF home without any anticoagulants having used the last of the packet I sent in. The carer couldn't give it at the usual time. Luckily I found some more at his house after I finished work so he had it late, but I will be raising a complaint as if I hadn't found some he wouldn't have had any until I could get some via a GP.

Thank you all for your solidarity and sympathy about Brother and his antics. I must confess that without your understanding (and support from DH too) I might have succumbed to the guilt and have stepped in to take over by now. I remain convinced that Brother's primary motivation in all this is protecting his bolthole and inheritance. But to some extent it's all symptomatic of his general immaturity and belief that he should always be shielded from any discomfort or disappointment, and that he can say/do whatever he likes without any consequences. Unfortunately our parents encouraged this by always doing whatever he wanted/bailing him out etc regardless of how unreasonable and how badly he treated them (all whilst telling anyone who would listen what a fabulous, intelligent, wonderful son he was. On the odd occasion that they initially said no he would kick off until they apologised to him and found a way to do what he wanted. So it's a real shock to him to be in a situation where Mum can't make it all go away and the person he expected to step in won't do what he says and won't give in to aggression. Unfortunately as a man in his 50s, it's rather late for him to learn that this is not how the world works and definitely too late for mum to realise that he is not always right.

Mum tells me that discussions have been had with my sister regarding her safety at home. Why I don’t know seeing as my sister sees her at most once a week and has no idea of her care needs or how well she mobilises or much else for that matter. She’s moving away very soon and won’t be around as much. I’ll be speaking to the doctors tomorrow and telling them that it’s mum and me they need to be speaking to and that LPA is me, not my sister. There’s talk of a rehab facility but I don’t know how feasible that is because last time I was told it could take weeks to get her a bed. I’ll see what I can find out tomorrow but mum sounds much brighter today and has been walking around with her rollator fine.

@Dormit so glad your DM is up and about and sounding brighter.

If the rehab unit is like the one my DM went to it is really a kind of 'hospital-lite'. The one DM went to was a nursing led unit, more space than a regular ward. A GP came daily.

DM had to wait for a bed to come available but that only took a small number of days as I think they re-shuffle patients through the hospital estate pretty regularly.

There wasnt a lot of rehab actually done, at least not with DM. In the olden days I think it would have been called convalescence. What it did was buy time to see which way the patient was recovering and what next steps would be.

Visited DM yesterday. Spent the whole afternoon with her but in truth she was awake for a total of 30 minutes of it. DD came with, DM enjoyed having us there chatting but dozed. When she did speak she was making no sense. Just words strung together.

DM was looking quite yellow and 'waxy'. She eats or drinks very little and then only if fed. Yesterday she was struggling to coordinate using a straw, couldnt close her lips round it. I cant imagine this will go on much longer.

@GnomeDePlume

@GnomeDePlumei can’t imagine how hard it must be to watch that play out

I’ve seen the hospital doctor today and she is very happy with mum who is medically fit. She just needs pain control and physio. Thankfully she’s not done any damage to where she had her surgery. The doctor agrees that she has capacity and there was no mention from her about a home or rehab just home and physio. I walked with mum over to the ward windows to look at the snow and she did great. Her mobility is as good as it was before the fall so I’m not concerned. I go away in February for 5 days so I want to make sure she’s got 4 calls a day until after I come back to make sure she’s well looked after.

That’s good news @Dormit that she’s not damaged where she had surgery.

Mine has pressed the emergency lifeline for the third time since Christmas because her hearing aid batteries were flat. I was still in bed and the snow was falling heavily, she wasn’t answering the phone or lifeline people (because she couldn’t hear…) but of course she could have fallen (she did the week before Christmas).

I managed to get DB to sort it but this can’t go on, my nerves are shot.

@GnomeDePlume that must be so hard.

I was grumbling about this the other day. It's one of those "breakdown of society" things, that Social Care doesn't provide a "handyperson" service, and the people who used to pop in and do odd jobs (husbands of church ladies, neighbours, teenagers belonging to friends or family, etc) just don't do that sort of thing any more. But it's the little things that precipitate crises - lightbulbs needing changing, phone being unplugged, TV remote batteries needing changing. And they're all things that carers won't do (fair enough as it's not in their scope of practice). But I feel like that sort of service could make such a different to people's independence.

@Dormit you said
She goes stiff as a board when she falls. No tumbles for mum, it’s like a cartoon where someone gets whacked on the head with a frying pan and they go stiff and fall flat on their face
"Impaired postural reflex"?
This came up in a very sad case near me where an older lady was just caught by a cyclist going past her slowly - she went over like a felled tree and died. A local doctor who witnessed it gave a statement and said, "he believed (she) had an ‘impaired postural reflex’ which he had commonly seen in his geriatric patients."

I hadn't known it was A Thing, but now I am keeping up with my yoga lessons (even more) religiously.

@roundaboutthehillsareshining it's a question of trust I think. Social isolation and so on. It's the sort of thing I do on my fortnightly visits down to my EPIC. Trouble is a PA agency for the elderly ("Universal Daughters" perhaps!) would be caught in between the massive amounts of vetting and oversight needed, precisely because the clients would be old, rich, isolated and frail, and the relatively small number of people who could pay for what that cost.

@GnomeDePlume thinking of you.

@GnomeDePlume thinking of you, it’s such a difficult time. The word gifted to me on this board was ‘courage’ and we need it. Be kind to yourself.

Had my mum at hospital today tried to explain the issues to the doctor but she said she wanted to hear it from DM. I know doctors are probably trained to always engage with the patient but the dementia has really affected her conversations and she was answering totally different questions to those asked. Would have been comical if it wasn’t so serious. Then as part of a totally different conversation DM blurted out ‘my leg has been hurting for ages’ which was the answer to the first question asked 10 minutes before.
I’m definitely gunna have to get better at this dealing with dementia lark as today’s 6 hour hospital visit was challenging to say the least.

@GnomeDePlume the watching and waiting is hard, I remember my DM going through that with my DGM. Sending a hand hold your way.

@BestIsWest that is good that your DB could handle it, but it all sounds very stressful.

@Dormit that is good news about your DM that the doctors support her going home again.

It is frustrating @Worriedreparents isn't it because they go through the motions to involve your parent, but your DP either hasn't got a clue or tells them either what they want to hear or what will get them out of hospital and back home quicker.

I have been at work today, kids back to school so DH busy too. DF has called 7 times to ask when DH is coming to see him. DB decided to turn up yesterday and did visit him, but has decided that DF looks back to 'normal' now and if he had a stair lift will be 'A' okay 👍 Nevermind the end stage COPD, AF and heart failure then 🙄

Another call from the Lifeline people this evening! This time to say the lifeline has been switched off. After getting a permanently engaged phone line I spoke to DB again who said he’d literally just left her and she was fine. So I’m guessing he’s told her off for using it for non emergencies and she’s switched it off at the mains. This is exactly the kind of thing she’d do. Will go up and check on her tomorrow.

@Worriedreparents full sympathy. Dementia conversations are bonkers. My DM is still very clear in her speech but makes no sense whatsoever. This caught out carers and HCPs because she sounded like she knew what she was talking about. The reality was that she was just stringing words together.

Yes, we are in the waiting stage. DB is exhausted by it. Sadly I dont think DM is capable of doing anything but existing in the moment.

@GnomeDePlume And then you've got the other one, like my elderly relative, who has pretty clear speech and on the face of it is making sense and speaking coherently. You have to listen carefully to realise it's all absolute bull.....

@MysterOfwomanY Yeah, trust and those relationships not existing, and the things that have developed to replace them, being tied up in their own safeguarding issues. I used to be a member of GoodGym, but got a bit frustrated that I wasn't allowed to do any of those obvious little things that would actually practically help the older person I visited - changing lightbulbs, changing batteries, getting things down from high shelves, etc.

And now national grid inform me she has a power cut, the phone isn’t working because of it and I can’t get there for a couple of hours. Ho hum.

My DM relied heavily on her lovely neighbours for the little jobs. It was them alerting me that they’d helped mum cook her evening meal every night that week to the fact that she wasn’t in fact managing as well as she assured me on the phone.

in hindsight, I think her logic was that it was only a little thing to ask the neighbour to work the microwave again and they were so kind and obliging, whereas telling me would have (and did!) involved a lot of work getting proper care arrangements in place.

@GnomeDePlume Thinking of you. The waiting phase is awful but hopefully you have the consolation that she is not in discomfort

@roundaboutthehillsareshining I know what you mean about seeming to be coherent. My DM struggles with finding the right words etc and can seem very obviously muddled. But she has phases where she sounds completely coherent and recounts very detailed stories of past events and detailed (almost scientific) explanations of why things need to be done a certain way. It's only those who know and her house very well that can identify that it's all fantasy. Some of it is almost paranoid, for example, the detailed description of my overseas wedding where we took all of DH's family but didn't tell her and DF until it was too late for them to renew their passports (they tried everything they could to get them in time but there was a strike) and organise travel insurance that would cover their various illnesses. The details of where we went, when we told them, what they did etc were incredible. But we were married locally and all of our parents were there. Apparently the photos I've shown her are from the party she arranged when we got home and I wore my wedding dress so that I could later pretend that it was the real wedding.

It's going now but for a long time my mum could spin a very convincing line. A year ago social services did a review visit without letting anyone know and came away thinking she was managing amazingly well with a lively social life. Except that the activities she said she went to every week either had stopped over a year before or she only went to very sporadically, sometimes turning up on the wrong day. And no, she didn't do all her own housework, cleaner 3 hours a week and no she didn't manage her finances on the computer, she's never done internet banking in her life.

That does seem to be a very strong feature of the early stages of memory problems. My Mum used to conflate lots of things together that actually happened but not like she said, and also just deny things had ever happened. Over time the denying has increased. To hear her talk she is convincing that she has never fallen, ever, but my DB and I have picked her up and other people have picked her up and told us about it. It makes it very difficult to put things in place to help prevent falling or to allow her to summon help when she falls because "that never happens" and therefore she doesn't need to be prepared for it.