Monthly Archives: May 2015

Mum gets institutionalised

Mum and I have both had a respite break. I visited friends, met up with pals from Australia and Canada and old friends from uni. I ate out, saw exhibitions, went to museums, watched movies. I packed in everything I could and had a great time. But I also got a cold and a stomach bug – possibly because I’m a bit run down – and when I got back here I was very tired.

For mum it was quite the opposite! She’d also enjoyed her break. She’d stayed in a residential home where the people are friendly and nice. They like her and she likes them. The change did her the world of good and she came home lively and energised from having some company. But she’d also got institutionalised which meant she expected me to work even harder than normal. So, for a while, we’ve been at sixes and sevens.

For instance: she’s still able to manage her own medication. She has three eggcups, one for the breakfast pills, one for lunch, one for dinner – and she sorts out the right pills into the different cups. All I have to do is help her get the pills out of their packaging, which is difficult for someone with bent-up arthritic fingers.

But at the home, they dished out the medication, and now mum has forgotten how to do her pills. She can’t remember which ones to take, and then she forgets if she’s taken them. In fact, if I don’t watch her with hawk eyes, she’s likely to take a double dose – and with the amount of painkillers she takes, this would not be a good idea.

She’s not only got out of the habit of doing a few small chores she can still do for herself, she’s also lost confidence in her own judgement. Every five minutes she asks me: Shall I change my shoes? Shall I have a drink? Shall I take the pills? What TV channels shall I watch? To which I reply, variously: I don’t know/ It doesn’t matter/ No, mum, don’t do it /Mum, I told you not to do it / Oh, do what you like.

I know mum’s condition will never improve but I don’t want to hasten the proceedings by letting her become lazy minded. So I’ve been trying hard to get her back to doing stuff for herself. And things are improving, slowly.

However, there’s one issue on which I simply can’t compete. At the care home, they have a proper chef. And it seems my meals just don’t compare with his! Mum keeps telling me, ‘this meal is quite nice, dear, but it’s not as good as what they served me at the home……’ All I can do is grit my teeth and nod. ‘Sorry mum, but this is the best I can do.’

I am defeated by dementia!

People tell me they don’t know how I cope. I say, ‘I don’t. Sometimes I throw up my hands and scream, ‘I am defeated by dementia!’

Most of the time you can still talk to mum and hold a conversation. It’s true you can have this same conversation over and over again but still, she is capable of having opinions and grasping logical ideas. She is for example very interested in the upcoming elections.

But then, suddenly you find yourself in the midst of a complete communication breakdown. It’s like there are these little whirlpools in mum’s mind where narrative logic breaks down. The first times it happened I got incredibly frustrated, ‘So thoughtless!’ I ranted to myself. ‘So selfish!’

The second time, it happened I got so angry I thought I was going to give myself a stroke, I swear I felt something pop in my brain. ‘So thoughtless! So selfish! Can’t she see this is stressing me out? Can’t she see that I’m really tired? Doesn’t she care?’ I tried to reason with her and it was like talking to a brick wall.

But I’ve realised, there’s absolutely no point in getting my knickers in a twist. Dementia’s like being on a boat that’s sailing peacefully down the river, going with the flow as it were. Then for no apparent reason, the boat ceases to go forward. Instead it’s caught in a whirlpool, going round and round and round. And it’s like that with mum, she gets these little whirlpools in her brain and she just can’t think beyond them.

For my own sanity and well-being, I have to learn to recognise when we hit one and learn to walk away without losing my cool. Because it’s quite clear, these whirlpools are only going to increase.