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.
Sad story but it doed sound like your father in law has dementia. I didn't recognize it with my own mother, I guess I was just in denial as she's always been angry and hateful to and with just about everyone but nice to me...then when she started lashing out at me and saying those mean and hateful things, it's become morethan I can take. She has short term memory loss, but not always that short. It's definitely dementia and part of that is mixing up stories like you mentioned, and "pitting" one against the other but as I said, she's done this for years.
Prayers are with you. It's horrbile when we love our parents, do anything for them for a single morsel of approval, only to be treated like crap.
Thanks for your response. We realize that his dad IS experiencing some mental slowdown, but his behavior is not much different than it has been all his life. It's sad that someone has spent most of 97 years being angry at the world, rather than applying that energy to something productive. We know he's not going to change, and we're just looking for coping strategies for what our reality is with him.
Yep, my mother too with the horrible behavior all her life and is why I didn't recognize the dementia but it got to a point where she couldn't pay her bills, thought others were tunneling under her house, and now is accusing me of stealing everything wherein I wouldn't take a pencil if it didn't belong to me and she knows it but goes for the juggular; anything to hurt and of this she is well aware as obviously is with your fatherinlaw. Wonder whatever happened to these folks to make them so heartless?
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