You My MiL has been in residential care for nearly 8 months. Her days are all identical. She gets up and dressed, walks around for a little while, and then gets undressed and goes back to bed. She stays in bed all day, watching TV, emerging from her room to ask about her mealtimes. This is like her routine at home, but she would be dressed in the sitting room watching TV. The staff and various assessors report she is calm and content, which we believe.
We had expected she would be starting to engage with the care home life by now! But no. It is her choice of course, and I accept the staff have to allow that. Her personal hygiene is a bit hit and miss. She finds conversation very hard, and shows no interest in visitors, to the extent that she sends them away, after as little as 3 minutes. Literally.
All she ever says, is 'are you coming next week?' And then insists we write it in the diary. Obviously she has no understanding of how the diary really works, and is always on the wrong week or day. She says we must bring the car to take her home, but shows no agitation when we say 'Not today'.
In other words her life is tiny, 'confined' to one bare room (has refused any things, pictures etc, has all her clothes permanently packed), does not read, talk to any one, join in anything) From the outside, it looks awful. We struggle to make sense of her condition. All the books I have read describe different kinds of dementia.
Questions. Is this familiar to anyone? And does anyone have any advice for us?
We had expected she would be starting to engage with the care home life by now! But no. It is her choice of course, and I accept the staff have to allow that. Her personal hygiene is a bit hit and miss. She finds conversation very hard, and shows no interest in visitors, to the extent that she sends them away, after as little as 3 minutes. Literally.
All she ever says, is 'are you coming next week?' And then insists we write it in the diary. Obviously she has no understanding of how the diary really works, and is always on the wrong week or day. She says we must bring the car to take her home, but shows no agitation when we say 'Not today'.
In other words her life is tiny, 'confined' to one bare room (has refused any things, pictures etc, has all her clothes permanently packed), does not read, talk to any one, join in anything) From the outside, it looks awful. We struggle to make sense of her condition. All the books I have read describe different kinds of dementia.
Questions. Is this familiar to anyone? And does anyone have any advice for us?