Dads continuing care home adventure with Vascular Dementia.

Its been over a year now since, as a family, we decided that Dad would be best at Meadow View Residential and Care Home. I haven't written a blog subsequently. There are many reasons for this, but I think the main one is motivation. Dad is not at his home, so the world should be at a stand still. Why should life carry on as normal when it is not normal?

Its not that any of us regret what has happened, in fact I do believe it is the best choice we could have made for all involved. Its more like life is different, and emotionally that has to sink in, be processed and a new life emerge. At first it was akin to a family member being in hospital. You visit as often and you could. When you are not visiting you are wondering how he is, what is he doing? (probably eating). Does he miss you? (probably not, especially if he is eating). When can you fit in a visit? In some ways this is a emotional wearying as caring you him at home, but without the physical aspect and with more sleep. For me the most imitate difference was when I noticed I was turning my phone of at night. This may seem small but it made me think how much caring affected my sleep patterns, always aware that I might get an emergence phone call at night. And that is we me not living with Mum and Dad. Mum was excited if she managed more than 4 hours of uninterpreted sleep!

Guilt is a big challenge. It does not really matter how many people tell you that you shouldn't feel guilty, its the best place, etc. etc. You will feel guilty, with a range of strange emotions that go along with that. Grief is another Curiously strong emotion to grapple with. The ending of a type of caring roll, the changing relationship of Father and Daughter. The biggest is of course the ending of a marriage relationship. It is a type of end that Mum has been surviving through. You try having a wedding anniversary with your life partner who is not sure what a “wife” is, and certainly not sure if you are his wife. But then are we convinced that Dad doesn't feel this connection, even if he doesn't know the words. We can never know this since Dad doesn't really show much outward signs of it. Very occasionally he will look up and see Mum when a carer is walking him over to Mum and say

“look its my Wife”

Bring tears to Mum that she has to hide so Dad doesn't see them. He is very sensitive still to emotion, but his ability to empathize is misplaced. He would worry that he has done something wrong to cause tears.

I don't want you to read this and think life is bad. Dad is very content there. Maybe happy, its difficult to tell. When you new family's come to bring in their loved one, seeing their emotional journey, I wanted to carry on the blog so that others could maybe see they are not on their own in their experience. I would say that I have never been so grateful that we made this decision and was in control of where Dad went, the day Mum decided to dislocate her hip. Now that is a whole different adventure of caring and hospital visits. From Dads point of view, if we had not made the positive decision for him to be in full time care. When the dislocation happened, Dad's social worker would have had to put him somewhere, anywhere. Somewhere that might not be suitable, or far away so we could not visit and look after a dislocated hip Mum. If you are in this position of home care make the hard decisions now, so that they are not forced on you when you are in total crisis point.

After about 3 months we brought Dad home. He is calm and happy to follow directions, so taking Dad out is relatively straight forward. It might take 10 or 20 minutes to get him in or out of the car. patience is needed.

This weekend I made Sunday roast for Mum and Dad. He does like food, especially pudding, and he loves chocolate ice cream too.

We watched trains on the telly, played with the fire. Nearly drank a whole cup of tea. Mum showed him slides of myself and my sister as little young things. He seemed interested in the slide view. Looking a great deal like a confused Spock looking down his scanner display.

After a few slides he looked up, pointed at me saying

“you were smaller once”

then when a slide of my sister was shown him

“that's our baby”

Lets see what words of wisdom my next visit to Dad will bring.