I didn’t think it could get worse but apparently it can and, no doubt with more to come.
I am sorry to bang on about this but it helps me to get down in writing what is happening and I hope if your close relative suffers from dementia, it will help you to know what is normal in this very abnormal disease.
At present I am experiencing daily haranguings, constant suicide threats, shouted curses and all that goes with the later stages of dementia. It is inevitable that that closest relative to the demented person is the one to get this abuse but it doesn’t make it any easier to bear.
It also is unhelpful that she is being sweetness and light to everyone else and poison to me.
The latest began yesterday. She had a nice visit in the morning from a friend who lives at a small distance, whose daughter brings her by car. The visit lasted about an hour and a half and then the carer made lunch. I rang mid afternoon and got the works for an hour, after which the carer put her to bed. With hindsight it was almost certainly exhaustion that caused it. I have noticed after a long visit, which, currently I would classify as any visit over an hour, that she is likely to be aggressive and threaten suicide.
This morning she was out when I rang; the carer had taken her to the coffee shop. She came on the phone reasonably cheerful but when I asked if she was better than yesterday she immediately became aggressive. I asked if she remembered threatening suicide in a conversation lasting over an hour, she replied that she had never spoken on the phone for an hour in her life, what did I think she was, stupid? If I thought she would ever do that I had another think coming………… and so on at the top of her voice very aggressively, whereupon, God help me. I hung up.
Being shouted at for an hour really destroys the rest of your day. I feel so low and despairing. I think I might ring the agency and advise them that I will not ring my mother for a couple of days. We’ll have to go, the carer tells me the petty cash is running out. Oh I need time off so badly, I have suffered from my mother’s illness for two years now, without a break and so has my husband. The trouble is that I feel sure the minute our feet touched other ground, somewhere away, there’d be a phone call summoning me back.
The most useful thing would be a prognosis but vascular dementia is the least predictable of all the dementias. Alzheimers produces a graph which is a slow steady decline but vascular dementia is characterised by lurching steps downwards, from each of which my remarkably resilient mother, seems to recover and carry right on.
In all of this suffering the saving grace is that I know I have done the best I can for someone who has abused me my entire life, though I don’t think I can withstand being screamed at on the phone anymore. It means, of course, if her social controls are going that her frontal lobes are now eroded too. If it moves backwards into the motor controls God help us all, then we’ll really find out how well the care agency can cope without a padded room.
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JaneLaverick.com – in the time that tries men’s souls, and mine too.