Venting, Mom!!

[ERLover]

Ya I know, was not going there any more.
Many have it worse here, but just need to scream at my SS friends here.
No replys are needed.
We are going on a year and a half, here wake up times and sleep times are out of mine, dietary/meals the same, thats why I am up now, I would be nighty night at 830-9 and up at 7ish, not tonight, hit the recliner at 8, Mom woke me up at 1030 her bedtime, out of a sound sleep, then 30 minutes later she gets to go to bed and sleep till 11ish and am still up and burn the morning away sleeping till 10ish.
She has gotten to be more of a load, lack of bowl control ect, heavy on the laundry load.
I have a great care giver that comes M-F to get Mom up, brunch, her laundry, and baking together, Mom is training her up on that, she has 2 sons in HS and a hubby that loves moms baking, we always send some home with her.
Okay, mom is 96+6 months, CHF, some kidney dysfunction about 50%, ect add it all up, loosing bowel control, my evenings/bed times are not to sweet, she does not know when she drops one, so Depends to contain them.
Getting old is a B, as friend told me years ago taking care of his mom, you are borne wearing dippers and you die wearing them.

[ChrisNeilan]

Hang in there! You're doing right for your mom.

[bill50cal]

you have it a lot easer than we do with the better halves mom. she has been with us for over 2 years and this one has been very hard on us. the mom is 100 percent bed ridden and some times does not even know her daughters name. the dementia will only get worse until she passes.she has been on hospice twice but they keep kicking her off as she is not deteriorating quick enough. so far there has only been a few mean outbreaks and it is hard for her to not take it personally. it is one heck off a roller coaster ride with her. i tell the better half if i had my way when i get to a certain point make the call to dr kavorkian to turn off the lights. we also went through this with her dad BUT he went extremely quick.

[robinson46176]

A maternal gg-grandmother died in a mental institution of "old age dementia". They didn't know what Alzheimer's was back then.
My maternal grandfather (who I liked a lot) didn't have any idea who I was sometime before he died. I used to drive to Indy to take him for medical care regularly and often worked on their house but we became strangers. Lung cancer eventually got him before the Alzheimer's did.
My parents both had Alzheimer's... My father was lucky, his congestive heart failure took him before the Alzheimer's did but he did have it pretty bad. It got to where I had to park all of my tractors away from the main barn-lot because he would sabotage them if I didn't. He would also steal things off of them. little stuff like the lynch pins for the 3 point hitch or the gas cap etc. He has been gone since about 1993 but I still have not found where he stashed the stuff he took. It has to be here, he couldn't leave the farm. lots of hiding places. He had three sisters that reached adulthood and all three of them developed really bad Alzheimer's. The middle one became violent toward the end and had to be restrained all of the time.
My mother was the worst. She rode the Alzheimer's train all of the way to the end of the line and crashed into the bumpers... I finally had to just stop almost all of my farming after taking care of her and Diana's mom (very good brain but many other health problems) became more than a full time job for us. I was having a terrible time keeping my mom from wandering. I later found out that she had been calling people that I knew and many that I did business with telling them terrible stories about me. Alzheimer's took her all the way down to where her body just finally shut completely down. It was really tough since mom and I had always been very close.
I only have one sibling, a sister who lives almost 1,000 miles from me. We were always close too. She is in late stage Alzheimer's and now doesn't know her own kids...
I'll stop here. I feel the need to go hammer on something...


.

[ERLover]

Wow Farmer, I hope it skips by you.

[Ed in Tampa]

Alzheimer's is a horrible disease. I saw it in a mother in law and now my brother.

As my doctor says you have to die from something.

I think a sudden heart attack or stroke doesn't sound half bad.

Maybe all the health foods and healthy living does is makes us live longer so we experience horrible things like Alzheimer's.

[BuckeyeDennis]

Starting when they were about age eight, I firmly instructed all three of my young children to just shoot me ... if and when I succumbed to the disease that eventually took my mother. Which they were witnessing in real time.

Not that I expected them to actually do it. And I well recall getting exactly the same instructions from my own mother. But there are those pesky legal issues, which prevent you from treating your parents as well as you would a pet dog. In my mother's case, her body outlasted her brain, which lost interest in eating, with the inevitable consequences.

Actually, I do think that my unseemly request of my kids will do a bit of good. They will not feel nearly as guilty, if the time comes, when they are darned good and ready to see me move on to the next life.

[ERLover]

Ya it is a terrible one, A. If mom was not so mentally sharp it would be easy to send her off to a home, but then she would give it up. Now with Carrie here a few hours a day, she grew up next door to mom, it has given mom like a best girl friend. Me, some eye candy.
Thanks all.