Ok, so, here's the thing. My father is 74 and has always been in great shape... at least physically. Recently I have become more and more concerned about his mental health. Without posting a LiveJournal about the details, I can say that I fear that he is bipolar. He also seems to be losing some sanity.
We have always had an interesting relationship, dating back to his divorce from my mom 20 years ago. At one point we didn't speak for over three years. He has always been very stubborn, but lately it's gotten to the point where he is doing things that make me very worried (spending money recklessly, impulsive road trips, etc). There was an incident back around New Year's where I seriously considered Baker Acting him. He has gotten much better, but still has "flare ups". A common thing is that he will call me to discuss something benign, then get very emotional and hang up... crying. He also seems to be very focused on the fact that he is old and, in his words, doesn't have much time left.
Compounding the issue is that he lives in Florida while I am in Connecticut, so it's not like I can drop by to check on him.
I am sharing this here because I feel safe in this community, and I figure that some of you may be dealing with the same type of issues. I didn't see another thread like this, so if this discussion is happening somewhere else on the forums, please point me to it. I guess I just need some support. Thanks.
Yeah, I can understand where you're coming from, and good luck. My mother's been increasingly forgetful, repeating stories we've already heard, putting things in the wrong places (at one point putting some lettuce in the cabinet with the plates) and so on. It's nothing crazy obvious but it worries me and my brother since her mother had a slow slide into dementia. And it's worrying for me because my grandmother lived for twenty years as an increasingly confused woman, which I obviously don't want to deal with and REALLY don't want my dad to have to deal with.
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My parents are 5 minutes up the road for me and it's still very hard. Offers of help with anything (hardworking, chores, etc.) are met with "No thanks." It makes no sense because my Dad has been opening their pool since before Memorial Day and my Mom complains, and I offer help and they start to argue. Mom is 70 and Dad is 77 (with some dementia seemingly with both.) They can't take care of their home and I can't help. Interestingly my Dad has taken to telling stories of his Mom and his strange family I never heard before.
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Will be following this thread closely. Parents are still doing okay though they're up there, but what concerns me is my mom trying to take care of her dad, who is really up there, without much help from her siblings.
"With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want." - Christopher Columbus
"There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind." - Vonnegut
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Following this thread. My parents are still relatively young (early 60s), but my mom is starting to worry me a little bit. Like bnpederson she just seems more forgetful, less present than before. She'll ask me the same questions or tell me the same stories over and over -- not a simple "oh, I've heard this story before" but there will be something simple or casual she'll ask me 20+ times over the course of a few months. She jokes about "the Alzheimer's" but there are some days that I wonder if down the line we'll be dealing with this more seriously. Probably really great that she loves to gamble, eh?
I had a similar experience with my father. We had a different relationship: we didn't talk to each other. Suddenly he starts calling me and wanting to talk. It took a while (because we didn't talk for several years) but he was having some mental issues; I didn't notice until we finally got together and I could see him. I was told that mental problems show up physically with older people (and my dad was under 60) because they often stop or change the way they take care of themselves.
So maybe the best way is to try and set up video chat. I'm not sure based on what you have said (and I am NOT an expert but deal with bi-polar disorder) that I would say mental illness is an issue. Getting old starts to get scary at some point and people do strange things in response sometimes. In that case he needs things to occupy his time, some people don't retire into something (they retire from something) and it leaves a lot of empty time.
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My father is 77 and I'm seeing the early stages of dementia/Alzheimer's get him just as it's gotten his father and three of his brothers.
I'll be honest. It scares the sh*t out of me.
One of my worst childhood memories was visiting my Alzheimer's stricken grandfather with my father in the nursing home. My grandfather freaked out because he had no idea who his son or I were and he was convinced we were going to hurt him. That tends to stick with you when you're seven years old and six months prior grandpa had been doing grandpa things like stealing your nose.
Right now it's mostly limited to bouts of forgetfulness, but he's had a couple of, well, tantrum-like outbursts that have frankly shocked my mom.
Both of them grew up in households where at least one of their parents required extensive, long-term medical care. That has made them both absolutely paranoid about making sure their affairs are in order: everything from their finances and extra health insurance to sorting out medical power of attorney and paying off their burial plot years ago.
For that I'm eternally grateful because I'm watching some of my cousins viciously fight among themselves because their mother never recovered from hip replacement surgery two years ago and is confined to a wheelchair now. Additionally, she's suffering from some pretty advanced dementia.
The problem is that some of her children are insistent that she's going to fully recover and walk again (no way in hell), some just want to dump her off on the state and divvy up her money, and some are just caught in the middle.
End of life discussions suck, but, seriously, start having them with your parents and with your siblings if you haven't already.
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Had a quick chat with dad while back home, he was crystal clear on wanting a DNR. Totally fine with that.
On the grandpa front, things went from bad to better to bad to better-ish. Mom moved him to a assisted-living facility closer to home, but the facility quickly realized he was going to need more care than they could provide. His knees are giving out more frequently, and his macular degeneration is pretty far along, as is his hearing loss. The good news is that he's now closer to a VA facility where he can get covered for proper hearing tests and hopefully new hearing aids. Being able to hear makes a huge difference for him.
But because of his legs, he's most likely wheelchair-bound for whatever number of years he has left. He just turned 90, so probably not many. Mentally he's still aware of what's going on, but regularly hallucinates or imagines he met people he never met, or hasn't met in a long time. (No Grandpa, Diane Chambers' mother doesn't sit across from you at meal time.)
So he's just moved into a nursing home now, still close to my parents, and my mom will visit him nearly every day for the rest of his life. The best part though is that it relieves my mom from the burden of taking care of him, which she had been doing on her own (family's spread out, c'est la vie) for many years already, driving 3-hour round trips to Plattsburgh (and Saranac Lake before that) almost weekly to make sure he's being taken care of. I hope she can finally get some rest.
"With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want." - Christopher Columbus
"There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind." - Vonnegut
CM, that does sound like he's in the right place, even better that your mom gets some much needed (and deserved) rest.
Someday I will put "pen to paper" and explain the story behind starting this thread... but it will take a bit of time and emotional energy to do so. I will say that things seem ok right now, but that can (and probably will) change at a moment's notice.
Abu is right
Top_Shelf wrote:- When you have to Waif, Waif, don't talk
Yeah, my grandmother died from dementia, and my father has recently started to act uncharacteristically forgetful/confused. Like one time when he was driving the two of us to lunch he made a left turn into the wrong side of a divided road. Mom too. In the past few months she's sent my son 4 pairs of basically identical khaki shorts. She's a regular drinker, and has exhibited notable behavior/memory changes while drinking for a long time now, so it's really difficult to say what might be alcohol-related in her case vs. something else. It doesn't help that they live on the opposite side of the country, so I don't see them enough to really get an idea of day-to-day behavior. Nor does it help that getting meaningful information out of them is nearly impossible, so we can't really work /with/ them on this.
Because of some health issues my dad had when I was little combined with his need to plan everything, he actually prepared me basically from gradeschool age for what to do if he and mom died suddenly, in terms of sorting out their finances and stuff. So this possibility has been with me basically my whole life. It lends an odd perspective to what's happening now.
On the flip-side, my other grandmother exhibited signs of something along the lines of depression (at quiet times she heard dirges for years late in life, for example), and yet she lived to 95 and would have kept going if a fall hadn't left her with a broken hip that she didn't recover from. She was totally on the ball mentally right to the end too, despite some of the issues she was having. Brains are complicated things.
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My mom's started doing this more and more lately. Her latest misadventure is narrowly missing getting t-boned because she looked at the light for the other lane and saw it was green and kept going thinking it was for her lane. It's got me worried and been talking to my brothers about it.
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Of all the forms I thought this maybe dementia might take, I didn't expect paranoia. Parents are visiting now and I find out my dad is preparing for the apocalypse. But he's always been so hardcore slightly off-kilter Christian that it kinda might almost be explainable as that (since it's all tied up in prophecy and his experience with economic theory). Except it's a definite change in behavior for him, so... yeah. He's talking about buying guns to protect the family though, so we need to get on that or I won't be visiting them with the kids in tow. The next few years promise to be interesting. Doesn't much help that we live across the country from them either. I'd been considering a move to be closer in case this came up, but it kinda sounds like my mom wants to get the hell out of dodge. For now I need to kick her in the butt to go talk to his doctor about our suspicions. If something medical is to be done about this I think it will have to be handled kind of like an intervention. Anyway, I had to vent. Didn't get much sleep last night from thinking about this stuff.
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Sorry to hear this about your dad. I think that you are 100% within your rights to let your parents know that you will not visit a household that has guns. I wouldn't do it in an antagonistic way, just in a caring way, but be firm.
Abu is right
Top_Shelf wrote:- When you have to Waif, Waif, don't talk
Hi folks,
this being the only semi-recent thread I found regarding the topic, I figured I´d jump in here.
Lots of background on what I´m going through, cross-posted from the depression thread.
In short, mom has advancing dementia, which I ignored for far too long, now I´m moving her close to me, which is not going nearly as smoothly as one would hope, and is kinda heartbreaking. It sucks to see how she still has dreams of how she´s planning to live and what all she wants to do, and having to think to myself "most of that is not realistic anymore".
It must be so horrible to wake up and have almost every day bring new disappointments (such as being unable to work the tv anymore - in spite of a Flipper remote.
...and of course there are slight guilt feelings underlying this, since loneliness is linked to accelerating dementia (she is increasingly socially isolated and even avoids going to things when she is invited), and I left the vicinity of my mother 9 years ago to pursue my dream of living in Europe again. I realize that it´s my life to live, but there´s that nagging question of "would it have gotten so bad, so quickly, if I had stayed?"
I had a friend, whose mother is much further along, recommend the book "The 36-Hour Day" to me. I also picked up "How to Say it to Seniors". I´ve got some reading to do... Does anyone have experience with these books, or recommend anything else?
This is a form of family suffering which takes place behind closed doors. Perhaps this forum group can be for family members/caretakers what the depression thread has become for anxiety and depression sufferers?
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I am right there with you. My dad is turning 75 next month, and he is seriously talking about starting a new career, many overseas initiatives for his family there, and other things. While I fully realize that some of this is legacy building, I simply don't see how he can accomplish some of the things that he talks about. Add on top of this the fact that he tends towards assholish behavior, followed by acting as if nothing ever happened, it makes it tough. It's gotten to the point where it is difficult for me to maintain contact with him (he lives in FL). Apparently he has taken to hounding my youngest brother now.
While the guilt is, I assume, quite natural, I highly doubt your particular location has much, if anything, to do with it. As much as we care about our parents, part of the job/sacrifice of parents (I have 4 kids) is preparing our kids to be adults, then letting them go live their lives. Most parents would probably love for their kids to never leave town (or, for some, the house), but kids need to spread their wings, wherever they take them.
While I have not heard of either book, so I can't help you there, I would love for this to be a place to get together to share resources, stories, and shoulders to cry on when needed.
Abu is right
Top_Shelf wrote:- When you have to Waif, Waif, don't talk
Thanks for the reply Abu. I think a few of us could use a refuge/advice thread like this... Best of luck with your dad. Luckily you have siblings you can share the load with. Just make sure you are all communicating well, so one of you isn´t shouldering a disproportionate amount of the load.
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I had this thought of buying a chalk- or markerboard and hanging it up next to or on the exit door, with the intention that it is used to write down things that need to be bought, or where we are, etc.
The idea is to avoid the current situation where she has collected 15 full bottles of fabric softener, 13 full bottles of detergent, 12 full bottles of windex, and enough bandages for a large kindergarten´s yearly supply....among other things. Also, to leave notes as to where we are, until WHEN, and with contact info, so she doesn´t get the neighbors to call all over trying to find us if we´re still at work after 5pm (for example).
Has anybody tried something like this? Was it successful?
One of the best things I´ve bought for her so far, and for our sanity, was a large display clock called Dayclox (on Amazon), which shows date and time, including the day, with multiple language options. The display isn´t too bright and even dims at night.
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