My father in law is 97 and had to move to assisted living in June because of health issues. This necessitated a move of 250 miles, away from his home of 60+ years, and near his son.
His wife died in 2005, and he has residual anger issues with my husband and I over moving her out of his home and into hospice. She had lung and liver cancer, and he was refusing to give her the prescribed medications and oxygen, and threw a fit when we intervened and moved her out. Fortunately, my husband had his mother's POA and hospice took care of her health needs until she died. So--we have a man with a history of anger and negativity, passive-aggressive behavior over a lifetime, and a manipulative personality. That sets the stage for current issues.
Now he is having kidney and bladder problems, and has been in and out of the hospital 3 times since June. He has been to two urologists, and can't get along with either. He has had a catheter in since late August, because he can no longer urinate on his own. He is angry about the catheter, angry about repeated UTI's, but he won't consider any of the options offered by the doctors. He gets his stories mixed up, and confuses who told him what and when. He has a series of "stories" that he tells people to garner sympathy about his health, but the "stories" are a compilaton of several different situations, and none are completely true. He does not have dementia, but definitely is beginning to slow down mentally. He gets mad at my husband for not being willing to drive him hundreds of miles so he can hate the next half-dozen doctors for the same reasons he hated all the others. (We live in a rural area miles from a major city.) He can't seem to understand that his options at age 97 are limited, and that we are trying to provide the best care that we can. He threatens my husband with lawsuits, and threatens to terminate the POA, but he has no other family or friends, and no one else to turn to. He is not even marginally thankful that he has a son who cares about him, and he complains about everything. Nothing is right.
My husband and I are at our wits end, and are fed up with the negativity and the threats. How do we deal with this? What could we do differently to try to help him? We have tried ignoring the bad behavior, and try not to argue with him since it's pointless, but he picks a fight about something anyway. He is used to being in control, and we know he's still trying to maintain some control, but he's not making good decisions. It's exhausting.
