There are situations like my grandmother. She's physically not too bad off, but failing mentally. 87th birthday coming in January. She had a "mild" stroke 4 (or is it 5?) years ago. It affected her sight and memory faculties. She had a childhood accident which resulted in near-complete blindness in her right eye. The stroke killed right-side peripheral vision, so now she is severely left-shifted. Diabetic (on pills, not shots), low thyroid, arthritis, slightly elevated cholesteral.
She refuses to consider leaving her home. We're basically "enabling" her to stay there, when she really shouldn't be. She is mostly able to keep the house up, mow the yard, but doesn't understand about proper nutrition to handle the diabetes and cholesteral. The stroke changed her sense of taste and smell, many things she liked in the past are now distasteful.
She can't remember things from one minute to the next, can't keep up with the day/date (I found a large analog clock with day/date, but she "forgets" to look at it). When some sort of event is coming up like a doctor appointment or a family holiday gathering, I typically don't tell her about it until the day before, or she'll worry and fret about when is it and constantly get the date and details mixed up, even though I tell her over and over and write it on a calendar. She likes to watch Wheel of Fortune ("Vanna"). I ask did you watch Vanna tonight? Response: Who's Vanna?
I'll cook something for her to eat, she doesn't like it. I'll buy groceries for her to cook, she won't do it, she doesn't know how any more but won't admit to that. She eats way too much "convenience" and "junk" foods that don't require much preparation and aren't the best for her condition. If I don't buy those things, she gets upset. We've gone round and round and round and round about eating bread. She thinks toast isn't bread, that the toasting process somehow changes it so it isn't "bad" (starch, diabetic) any more. She had an accident a couple weeks ago with bread getting stuck in the toaster, caught fire. She threw the toaster out, said it's old. It wasn't. It was my toaster that I gave to her less than two years ago, the LAST time she had the same kind of accident.
She refuses to ask anybody for help, but expects that others should *know* that she needs it. She is very bitter toward a neighbor who has broken off contact in the last couple years. Granny helped this neighbor numerous times in the past, such as taking her to the doctor when she broke her arm. I asked her how did you know Marie needed help getting to the doctor? Answer: She asked me. OK, have you ever asked Marie to help YOU with anything? Answer: NO. OK, so how is she supposed to know if/when you need something? Could you go over and *ask* her if you could ride along to town? Answer: silence.
(By the way, 99% of the time when I ask granny to go along with me to the grocery, she won't go. I asked her this afternoon to come to my house and we'll cook some stir-fry chicken, she refused, said the weather is too cold.)
What's the solution? Keep "letting" her stay at her house until there's some major accident or tragedy like the house burns down or I find her in the yard with the riding mower turned over? She refuses to have a 3rd-party come in to help, even for just a couple hours a few days per week, we already tried that. There's no way she'd move out of the house and in with immediate family. She has her mind set that there's an enormous honor to dying in one's own home. After years of pondering what to do, my mother finally managed to get her elderly aunt (granny's sister) and uncle (he had a stroke some years prior) out of their shack of a house into a nursing home. Unfortunately the aunt died *very* shortly after. Long story, can't go into that now. This happened within a year of granny's stroke and she was not aware at the time that they had moved to a nursing home. She was told Emma had died, attended the funeral, etc. but we didn't tell her for a couple years that Emma had not died at home, but rather at a nursing home. For lack of a better way of putting it, granny was "pleased as punch" that Emma died "at home" and it was a blow when she was eventually told the truth. We can't get her to understand, or perhaps to accept is a better term, that if Emma hadn't been so bullheaded about cooperating to get better care for herself much sooner, it likely wouldn't have happened that way. My sister's mother-in-law went to a nursing home of her own accord a couple years ago when she realized she couldn't handle living alone any more. Granny has visted Marilyn there a few times, understands the situation and seems impressed with the whole scenario. Of course it's all fine and dandy for somebody else, but not for herself.
