Hospice for Dementia?

[Lila13]

I hope the staff will let you know in time. I hope they care enough to notice.

Of course I know people do die unexpectedly in all sorts of circumstances. Even young healthy people. But then there's an inquest.

I know I should have got cabs to go there every day, but they had told us 4 weeks.

They accused me of neglect. I suppose it is always the one who has been there most who gets those accusations.

 

[Kayla]

Hospice for dementia

Hiya Debbie and Lila,
After eight months in the nursing home, this afternoon Mum actually said for the first time, "I live here, you know." She really has settled down in the NH and feels it is more like home to her and she enjoys talking to her new friend.
My Dad was in hospital for four weeks, with heart and kidney failure, in July 2000. They were trying to get him stable enough to be sent home, or to a care home to recuperate. Mum visited him every day and I took her on alternate days. One afternoon we arrived, and the ward was closed to visitors because there'd been a death.
My Dad had a heart attack just before visiting time and they had tried to contact us before we left home. We were too late, but they couldn't have rung any earlier. Even if we had been there sooner, it wouldn't have made any difference to him, as the heart attack was unexpected and sudden. At least he was at peace and in no more pain. His legs had swollen up and they couldn't find the best medication to sort the problem out. He was 84.
I know I wasn't there at the very end, but we saw him as often as possible and he had other visitors too. The staff said he had a very positive attitude to life and his sudden death took them by surprise too. He wrote a letter to an MP just before he died and he asked a friend to type it, but he wasn't able to sign it. I posted it anyway, with an explanation about why it was unsigned and the MP wrote back. Dad was still very alert mentally at the end and didn't have dementia.
I think we can only do our best and sometimes the unexpected happens and things don't go the way we had hoped.
Kayla

 

[Lila13]

I'm glad your mother has settled and knows she lives in the NH, Kayla.

Doctors and nurses kept saying there was very little wrong with my mother, "nothing serious".

My mother was only in hospital for 5 days that last time, they said she only needed "building up". I couldn't get there as often as when she was in her own local hospital because of the distance, but if I'd known it would only be 5 days I'd have got cabs.

I don't know what she really died of, at least she went peacefully in her sleep, so at least we didn't have the dilemma of being offered those last-minute choices.

I am sure my absence on those last 2 days made a difference, as she must have felt we'd abandoned her in that horrible place. In the respite place she had remembered "it's only 12 days", but then in that hospital I don't think she had any grasp of time so couldn't remember my brother would be coming on Saturday or that we'd both be coming on Monday for a meeting with the social worker to decide where she was to go next.

She had signed and addressed a card for a friend on the 21st April, probably the last thing she ever wrote (but wouldn't come to the postbox with me), and I'd said how pleased her friend would be to see she'd been able to do it herself as she couldn't at Christmas, then the following week received a card from her friend's sister to say the friend had died a few weeks before. That was one of the last straws.