Caring for people with dementia - Hints, tips, support

wesimmo

wesimmo

wesimmo

Soldato
Joined
19 Mar 2012
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Following on from some discussion in the Euthanasia thread I thought it might be useful to have a thread about living with or caring for people with this horrible disease.

Unfortunately my dad passed away 3 weeks ago after a long fight with the disease, leaving my mum who has had a terrifyingly rapid decline in her mental state. She basically cannot be trusted to look after herself, drive safely or even be left at home with the grandkids for a couple of hours.

The problem we have is she will not accept her situation and any help we try and give her.

As a result we're constantly trying to rescue her from her own actions.

One example would be her fridge breaking and rather than asking us to help she sent £750 to a fraudster resulting in hours of my time trying to get the money back etc.

What we'd like to do is have a 'mirror' of her phone so we can monitor what she's doing, keep up with doctor appointments, ensure she's on top of bills and not being ripped off via phishing texts and emails, etc

Is there any legitimate way of doing that? We have full LPA over her.
 
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Sorry for your loss and situation with your mum.

We have the mother in law who is 91 and she lives in a 2 bedroom annexe on our grounds. In terms of calls, I use unify stuff, including talk and that gives us visability over all in/outbound calls and we also record it so we can play it back if needs be. You can also use built in AI to generate transcripts. We can block/re-route calls too.
 
HoneyBadger said:
Sorry for your loss and situation with your mum.

We have the mother in law who is 91 and she lives in a 2 bedroom annexe on our grounds. In terms of calls, I use unify stuff, including talk and that gives us visability over all in/outbound calls and we also record it so we can play it back if needs be. You can also use built in AI to generate transcripts. We can block/re-route calls too.
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We're trying to balance letting her have some 'dignity' and choosing our battles as she's aggressively argumentative whenever curtailing 'her rights' are mentioned.

Also, trying to get her to use a new way of communicating etc is probably not going to work, we're currently on holiday in a villa and because it's not familiar to her she can't find her room and at one point couldn't even find outside.

We'd really prefer to let her continue doing what she does but with more oversight.
 
wesimmo said:
She basically cannot be trusted to look after herself, drive safely or even be left at home with the grandkids for a couple of hours.
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wesimmo said:
we're currently on holiday in a villa and because it's not familiar to her she can't find her room and at one point couldn't even find outside.
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I'm sorry but at this point you really need to look for sheltered accommodation or an old peoples home.
 
I have a cheap phone and setup online banking on that. I did see a fraudulent transaction on his CC, so it's working!
I've put all this accounts online for water, elec etc...so I can monitor those.

I have the NHS app on there too, so can see those things.

Not sure how it's going to work with the dentist, I need to phone them tomorrow to adjust an appointment, but I think they'll say no.
We have medical LPA so might need to use that.

Currently getting our dad diagnosed for dementia, gone down the private route as the NHS is 6 to 12 months. But he did phone the police and they submitted a MASH report to the doctor, but still don't know how quickly that with hurry up the NHS. So will stick with the private route.
 
wesimmo said:
The problem we have is she will not accept her situation and any help we try and give her.

As a result we're constantly trying to rescue her from her own actions.
Click to expand...
It's unfortunately the way it goes, you can only do so much to help them from themselves, the rest you just sadly have to leave to fate as you can't be watching them 24/7, there's only the one difficult road for dementia for all involved, if you haven't already you should look at some carers and there's maybe some financial support/services you can get for her as well https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/get-support/legal-financial/council-tax-dementia is one example
 
Minusorange said:
It's unfortunately the way it goes, you can only do so much to help them from themselves, the rest you just sadly have to leave to fate as you can't be watching them 24/7, there's only the one difficult road for dementia for all involved, if you haven't already you should look at some carers and there's maybe some financial support/services you can get for her as well https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/get-support/legal-financial/council-tax-dementia is one example
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Thanks, but yeah we've been down this road with dad, carers 24/7 at the end, so we've got some experience.

This is the problem with dementia, everybody does it differently.

Dad was mainly happy to sit and watch golf, cricket, Only Fools and Horses and Last of the Summer Wine. He kind of accepted / knew he was gone and also had mum to help. He never used technology anyway either and mum had control of the finances.

Mum is a very different case. We could just take her phone and tablet off her, but the preference would be to let her have as much perceived independence as we can but with more oversight.

I can get her email account on one of my devices, probably WhatsApp too. But things like texts from the doctors etc its more difficult.

Ultimately if I can't mirror her phone, we'll invoke the LPA with places, but she will kick off about it, our relationship is already fraught as she insists she's fine and we would prefer to avoid that getting worse but we may have no choice.
 
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