My mum is now in a care home - a wonderful care home with lovely staff and plenty of daily activities and events. Mum is 91 with quite advanced Alzheimer's (& poss Lewy Body). She was living on her own in a bungalow close to us, with carers 4 times a day & me after work, weekends etc. She had been having visual & auditory hallucinations for a few years, gradually getting worse. In April she had a bad fall & broke 2 vertebrae, & spent 2 weeks in hospital before being transferred to a nursing home on a 6 week assessment placement (D2A). After the multi-disciplinary team assessment & meeting with me, we all agreed mum had gone downhill to the extent that going home wasn't an option, so I had to look for a permanent care home for her (she doesn't qualify for nursing care).
Mum is really a very placid, friendly, amenable & happy person, & was settling in really well at the care home. She doesn't know she won't be coming home, and thankfully doesn't keep asking, but today when I visited, one of the senior carers spoke to me saying mum has started getting very agitated and angry, especially at night, & shouts out, throws her zimmer frame aside, & gets snitchy with the carers. I was so disappointed to hear that ?. She was fine & happy the past few weeks, so I'm upset about this. She has had a recent UTI, and a course of antibiotics, which had to be cut short due to upsetting her tummy & causing awful 'explosions' to put it politely! They have asked the GP about her uncharacteristic outbursts, & he is prescribing Lorazepam, so hopefully that will help. They are also going to try moving her from her (specially & newly decorated) room upstairs, to a downstairs room so that there will be more people about & she can just leave her room & go into the lounge or move about the corridors. It's maybe too quiet upstairs & she has to be brought down in the lift, so maybe this will help. I don't know what to do, I told the carer I was so sorry she was behaving badly! It is a special dementia care home & they are used to it, but nevertheless I feel bad. When the carer took mum back in at the end of my visit, mum was as sweet as can be, patting the carer on the hand saying what a good friend she was! I suppose it's just the way it goes with dementia, but it has upset me a bit so I just had to post this & see what other people say about their PWD & how they cope with it.