What do you do when your Mom is working against you caring for her and being mean about it?
She has been diagnosed with Dementia. She had fractured her L1 last winter and spent time in the hospital & rehab. She was acting nice and cooperating with the physical therapy until last week, when she turned nasty. She gets up at night and roams the house and goes outside without her walker. She used to raise kittens and has had many kittens and cats through her life time. She is now looking for her cats from 30-40 years ago. She accuses that we took them and killed them, that she is going to slice us up like we did her cats. We don't know whether to take her seriously or not. She is so angry and not in reality. The doctors said he can't give her anything to calm her down because she has kidney cancer that looks like has traveled to her stomach. She also has hardening of the arteries for a long time and congestive heart failure. She is 89 years old. I am 71. My youngest sister also helps with the cats and she does all the laundry. I need advice on how maybe I can get my mother calm and responsive again to our care.
What you need to take seriously is that your mother needs to be looked at by a Geriatrician and a Neurologist. She may have had one or more strokes. It could be a major progression in dementia. It could be a UTI or a conflict in her meds or all kinds of things. A family GP is not trained to handle these things. Doctors are not known for admitting when they don't know what to do and will often blow patients off. If that's what's going on, it will be detrimental to all of you.
She needs to be in a nursing facility under the care of trained professionals. Otherwise, she could wander and get hurt quite badly, or cause a major accident at home.
My mother's hallucinations and wandering have her in a locked unit and she has to take some pretty strong anti-psychotic meds to stay reasonably calm. Otherwise, she is exhausting herself with wandering, ranting, raving, violent outburts, and very extreme paranoia.
It does NOT have to be like this. You just have to get her connected to the right doctors to make any progress. And it sounds like you know of one doctor specifically who is not on the list anymore! Good luck out there and please come back to tell us how it's going.
Then, I would think she'd had a stroke, from the sound of things. But I'm not a doctor. For there to be such a sudden change, something had to have happened. I would ask them to check more thoroughly for the cause, not just throw a pill at it.
I so sorry your mother is having such a hard time of it. cancer and heart trouble and the rehab and all. It just may be too much for her.