90 year old mum lives with my sister in a pretty luxurious situation. She has her own beautifully renovated fully kitted out granny flat with all teh mod cons including a pool and spa outside her bedroom and a specky view across the Canning River, but she is not interested in any of this.
Mum has medium level dementia, ie, cannot deal with money at all, puts the electric kettle on the gas stove and then asks me to fix it, repeats the same old stories over and over, does not know what day of the week or even roughly what the time of day is, forgets to eat and drink, cannot watch TV (limited english language ability and the plots go too fast for her) she does not read, and finds it hard to sit still for more than 5 minutes.
At times mum suffers from strong paranoia usually about various people stealing her stuff, especially her garden plants. Usually she just misplaces stuff, she doesn't really know what she has or where she put it all. Mum has never had any close friends, still knows who her kids and most of her grandies are, but she cannot remember her own nieces and nephews. Mum knows she has something wrong with her head but blames it on medication, her other trivial (for a 90 year old) health conditions, or the neighbours, or my sisters who she says mistreat her. Instead they are super nice to her
The sister mum lives with provides all meals and Mum eats well, usually with my sister or other sibling when we drop around. Mum is quite physically fit as she goes up and down the stairs to my sisters area of the house many times a day.
The only thing mum is interested in is gardening, which she does up to 8 hours a day even when it's over 100 degrees in the shade.
This involves:
- draping rags over many of the plants to reduce sun damage.
- removing the odd weed (its lucky one even gets to raise its head), removing dead heads and leaves,
- repeatedly rewatering the same patches of garden
- forgetting to turn off hoses.
- removing the rags from the plants when the sun goes down
Rags draped over plants aside, the garden is indeed very nice, if somewhat waterlogged in parts, because it is also fully reticulated and mums watering is a tad sporadic. As result my sisters water bills are OTT.
Two weeks ago mum dropped a small pot plant on the inside of her ankle and split the skin open and had to have 11 stitches and was told to wear a moon boot and to keep her leg up and do nothing. The moon boot lasted an hour and she has been sneaking off to the garden. This morning my sister went out to do some shopping and came back to find mum watering the garden with her leg in a plastic bag, and sweating profusely under the 100+ degree sun. Mum claims all her children are useless because otherwise we would be out there helping her water the garden. We cannot reason with her as she is very determined and it usually ends up in a yelling match.
We have mum booked in with 6 nursing homes but she gets very dark looks on her faces if we talk about this.
In the mean time should we
- let her keep watering till she falls over and does a hip, or worse?
- remove the hoses from the garden
- other?
If it were up to me I'd like to go round there with a flame thrower and torch the garden but sis would complain and all mum would do is roll her sleeves up and then ask to go plant shopping.
All my siblings and I have been to a 2 day "living with dementia" workshop. Interesting and helpful in small ways but they could not help much with mum's specific situation.
As usual it's even more complex than I describe above - just venting really :)