Dreading the phone ringing

[Scaredeycat]

Just wanted to say this somewhere safe. When my phone rings and it’s my Mum’s number or the manager at the sheltered accommodation, my heart just drops. I know it’s going to be another problem, another thing for me to sort, never get so much asa how are you or please, just a list of things to do/arrange/visits to sort usually necessitating cancelling my own plans. I’m just tired and fed up, and guilty. Aaaarrrggh.

Yup I know this feeling so well. I used to change my ringtone every month to try and reduce the automatic stress response a bit.
Its a lot better now they are in a care home, but it’s so awful when DM phones because I can’t understand her over the phone anymore due to dementia related speech loss, I don’t answer it because there’s nothing I can do. We visit ( DH and I no siblings)2-3 times a week so I figure if it’s something important we’ll find out then.

My DM stopped answering when my GM rang. Listened to the message and ignored the vast majority of them. It only resolved when she went into care, and a crisis had to be forced to enable that.
The wants of those at the end of life don’t trump those of others in the prime of theirs.

It's texts for me, I've had to mute her, she just dumps every passing thought on me and gets highly anxious about the most trivial matters all day every day. And this is at early stages for us, she's still at home, no carers, no dementia diagnosis, just not coping emotionally but everything i do to try and help is wrong.

I've changed the ringtone for DM so when I hear the Imperial march I know it's her. It just takes the edge off.

Oh yes I know that feeling it’s horrible, for me it was the worst thing about caring for my parents. Every night I went to bed it was my last thought, would the phone ring, what time would it be, such an awful way to live.
If your mum is constantly ringing it might be time for a care home instead there’s obviously things she’s not coping with. When my mum went in a care home she used to ask the carers to ring me, until I told them not to ring during the night unless she was very ill, she had dementia by then and there was nothing I could say or do to help. She had dementia by then. It was such a relief after 40 years of caring.

I hear you. My mother can no longer make phone calls but I dread the care home calling. Every time I see her she talks about her death and cries, I dread the call telling me she has. Though it’d be a blessing in some ways.

It's very stressful. Was she reliant on a partner to do these things who is now deceased?
She might be really lonely if she lives on her own. Do you think she is making excuses to have conversations, does she have any friends or might she developing signs of cognitive decline?
Potential solutions really depend on the reasons behind her behaviour. If she is becoming forgetful she might be very scared of what is happening to her.

Thanks all. Yes she is scared and a bit lonely but she’s never been one for chatting or even showing much interest in other people. I know that sounds bad, but I am just worn down.

Very hard. Probably lonely. Its tiring though as you say.

I can fully sympathise - I was exactly the same. Mum died in June and it's only in the last week I realised that I no longer need to take my phone upstairs when I retire for the night.

My mum was determined to try to text me but her failing eyesight meant that she could no longer really do it - and she kept sending them to the landline number rather than my mobile which meant it cost us money each time for an automated voice from BT to try (and usually fail) to read out the gobbledygook that she had sent.

Mine was driving me up the wall with the calls and messages but I’ve started using Do Not Disturb on my phone to cover my working day and commute which has been a massive improvement! I’ve set it up so that my DH and my children’s school phone numbers will still ring through.

The time there was a crisis I didn’t see the calls until about eight hours later which wasn’t a problem as the hospital
staff dealt with the immediate stuff.

To add, it means that I can group the things she wants me to deal with/sort out into a time when I choose to do it, rather than loads of small things coming up and disturbing everything else I need to do.

I did have mine on Do Not Disturb overnight, but then Dad's nursing home had to call an ambulance for him in the middle of the night and the paramedics called me on their phone rather than the home one (which I have listed to break through DND) and I missed the call. But I have muted texts, Mum is the only person who sends me them, the rest are 2FAs and so on, everyone else uses whatsapp and messenger. But I still check the texts a couple of times a day and reply and then if I'm not careful I get sucked in. I have missed important calls during the day through having DND on too, so mute texts works better for me. But she calls quite a lot too.

In my case it is because she is completely floundering without Dad who used to do all their admin, but the anxiety is off the scale and always has been, it blighted my entire childhood and adolescence and she has never sought help or acknowledged it's an issue, she just copes by dumping on other people and was content to let Dad do all the paperwork and house maintenance etc and not make any effort to learn (realised recently that she only had a vague idea that a credit card is different to a debit card). So I am less sympathetic than I could be,

Yes, remember that well, AL was terrible like that. The calls from the staff could have been anything from 'your mother has run out of teabags/needs a lightbulb changed' to 'she's had a fall and you need to come here right now'. I have to say that since she went into a care home, they've only called me a handful of times and the relief is immense. Although I now know that if the phone rings, it will be something serious.

Mine does that occasionally but we don't tend to check the landline any more. She's hard of hearing so texts are better than calls, also in the earlier days she would refer back to things we've said previously but she sends so many now that the useful information gets lost in the stream of messages.

The problem with the BT service is that once they have a text message to relay they call the phone about every ten minutes until someone answers - so short of unplugging the phone you have to pick up - in the end I go someone to remove the landline number from mums phone altogether.

You have my sympathy. I think with my mum when she aged her world shrunk and she became more selfish. I was working full time and helping her do everything in her own home. I went around after I had surgery to remove a growth on my tongue that was possibly cancer. I showed her the stitches and the swelling as I could hardly talk. I was in pain..She said "oh dear" and handed me her shopping list and went back to watching the TV. She never asked about the results. I dreaded the phone going as well.

Ah, that must have changed then because we used to get them as just missed calls and you had to press 1 to listen or something, but that was years ago. I can't remember the last time our landline rang.

We get quite a lot of calls from the care home, mostly at the weekend when the management team aren’t there and the carers want to defer any tricky decisions or maybe are worried they will get in trouble if they don’t let us know about the smallest incident. Thankfully my nerves were so shot by the time they made it into the care home, DH takes the calls so I don’t need to make any decisions in the moment.

Things get worse in the winter; it's quiet now, so not so bad.
But sometimes it was awful - fielding calls by the side of busy roads in the freezing cold...
In the end I muted all text notifications and check them once or twice a day, like I do emails.
And I will put my phone on DND. But I live a good way away and she has carers.
I really feel for the "round the corner" crowd, who are the sensible ones to call if they've fallen and can't get up... but also get called because, whatever.

If you are constantly being phoned up it sounds like she needs more support than she is getting where she is.

the Care home where mine is have a policy of email for stuff that can wait (can you bring x next time you come kind of stuff) and phone calls only for urgent stuff like a medical appointment that day that I might want to be there for.

That sounds sensible, except you'd probably be braced to hear something awful if they did ring!

Yes, that’s the down side. They phoned this morning (it was ok) and my heart missed a beat even though they start each call there’s nothing to worry about