Help, feeling so low

[MaNaAk]

Dear friends,
So, I'm afraid the nightmare continues. Over a week ago the carehome phoned us at 7.30am saying they couldn't care for Mum anymore so we needed to collect her. She was very angry, had been trying all the doors and trying to escape... short cut then to now she's back at home and I'm worried about how to keep her safe. I've managed to get social services involved and she has carers visiting morning and evening for up to 6 weeks while they assess her needs. A worker had visited her and reported that he felt she had no support needs! I couldn't believe it! Mum is really good at masking and really stubborn. (She told me she couldn't understand the male worker who came out to see her.) She would rather strip wash herself than admit she needs support to get into the bath. She will tell people she has food in the freezer (but that doesn't mean shes eating). She will tell me she feels "muzzy' and thst she doesn't understand what is happening. Ive tried to encourage her to tell the carers how she feels but she says they don't ask her so she doesn't tell them. She thinks that having carers is embarrassing. Also she would rather I helped her than a carer. Yesterday she texted me on her mobile to say her landline phone wasn't working. I managed to organise for a friend to call in to see what the problem was; she'd switched it off at the plug. She will phone me in the evenings very distressed and muddled.
I am just so worried that carers going in won't see her confusion and distress and will decide she won't need support which will put it all back on me. My GP has signed me off with "situational stress" for 2 weeks. I need to go back to my (stressful) job but I just feel like I am stuck with this situation and I don't know how to make things better. This evening my Mum said she wanted to cancel the social services visit as she wanted to go to bed. She said she feels she has no autonomy. I feel like I am having to fight to get support for her but then fight my mother to accept the support. Any ideas gratefully received. I just wish I could hand this all over to someone else for a while. I'm generally a pretty resilient person but don't think I have anything left.

Dear @breakingpoint,

I think you need to look for a nursing home rather than a care home and I think you need to show your GP's letter to social services to show that you can't cope. I always worried that dad's care home would email me to say that they couldn't cope but thankfully that never happened and he ended up on memantine at the end.

Hugs

MaNaAk

 

[Kristo]

I think it’s inhuman the way that the system expects family members to bear the brunt of the physical and emotional sides of caring for people with dementia and that the only way to get more help is to leave the person on their own and wait for something bad to happen. They know that we won’t do it! And that if we do wait for a crisis, then we feel a thousand times more guilty than we already do. We are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, it just makes me so angry. I would recommend keeping notes of all the instances when your mum shows obvious signs of not being able to care for herself, and investigate nursing homes with decent dementia units. Good luck x