Caring for a Dementia Patient. Help?
The story is fairly simple.
My mother in law had a massive heart attack last August which required a quadruple bypass surgery and heart stint operation.
My husband and I were living in another part of the state at the time, and I moved back immediately to care for her because, of course, American Medical Insurance kicked her out of the hospital despite the doctor’s insistence that she be rehabilitated for an additional week.
Once I got her home, and settled in, the task of taking care of her and the home became my number one priority. My husband and I actually purchased the house from her and used the monies to rehabilitate the house itself due to years of neglect etc.
Six months later, my husband finally joined us after he was able to transfer inside of his company to a closer facility.
I have become the sole provider of care for her and in the time we’ve been here, she’s had to be placed on a mood stabilizer (Prozac) due to mood swings but lately it isn’t working as well as it had been. Mostly, she’d become really mean and really demanding.
I would love to say this isn’t her, but to be completely honest, it’s like the ‘veil’ has been removed, or her filter has been removed, and the ‘real her’ has shown up full force.
As a matter of fact, judging from the way her children react around her ( my husband included) all she’s ever done is be abusive toward them.
My MIL is, per the doctor, morbidly obese. She doesn’t exercise, she gets up in the morning and get’s in front of the television, and only moves to go to the bathroom and to eat dinner.
I’m in control of the food budget in the house, I buy groceries, I cook and I watch what kind of junk food comes in. I will allow her a ‘treat’ sometimes, but I won’t allow her to gorge herself on junk the way she wants to. When she hands me her ‘grocery list’ it reads like the list was made by a stoner (cookies, cake, ice cream, ice cream sandwiches and so forth).
Instead of buying junk, which by the way is super expensive, I buy salad stuff. Kale, arugula, bell peppers (red, yellow, orange), onion, croutons, popcorn chicken (I know it’s not the best, cut me some slack) and the dinners I make are also healthy and colorful. I keep beef to a minimum ( I do add some once in a while to make sure her iron is up). I make sure there are lots of fruit and vegetables and so forth.
Tonight, she started a fight over pop-tarts. And she wants Cinnabon's. She lies. She is a pathological liar, she tried to tell us that the hospital she was in, recovering from heart surgery, let her have pop-tarts. That they let her have ice-cream.
No sooner had my husband walked in the door from a 12 hour shift, she laid into him out of nowhere about her pop-tarts. She’d been fine all day. I hadn’t head a word out of her and wham, here it comes.
I spend my week caring for this woman and her husband (whom she also mistreats) but I have to tell you, I am bone tired. I’m just tired. What do I do? Between my husband’s needs, my career as a writer, and this, there’s nothing left for me at the end of the day.
Am I doing something wrong?
