If you don’t like family dysfunction stories… don’t click the link :)

So I’m talking with my mom yesterday and I ask her how things are going with Dad. You see, mom spends the night at her mom’s house because she can’t be alone. So Dad is alone a lot till about 8:30am in the morning. Dad has Alzheimer’s. It’s the beginning stages, but it is progressively getting worse. And I have pointed out, much to my mom’s distaste, that she can not go much longer playing the caregiver to two different households without someone’s health suffering – perhaps even her own.

More backstory here is that my sister and her husband were staying with my dad for the last six months while they bought a house. That bought my mom time to stay with her mom when she was recovering from a massive infection. My mom stays with my Grandma who’s in and out of congestive heart failure and is bordering on not being mobile at all. My mom’s own health isn’t spectacular.. as she is prophylactic antibiotics to keep a osteomyelitsis MRSA infection in-check. She’s having the last toe on her foot amputated in Sept. So to me… this whole situation feels like a big house of cards built on sand. Mom is playing the martyr really – not preplanning or anticipating the future at all. I guess she can really barely even function in the present. I just see that something is eventually going to shift and then everything is going to come crumbling down.

So mom comes home and dad tests his blood sugar, That morning his fasting blood sugar was 140. So my mom tells him to take two units of insulin before breakfast. She goes into the bedroom. Dad gets his injection ready.

Dad comes into the bedroom a short time later and tells her they have a problem. Seems he got distracted (or something) while he was getting his shot ready. Instead of injecting himself with 2 units of insulin, he injected himself with 35 units. Oooops.

Now, she’s lucky really that he’s at the point where he is aware enough to realize he made a mistake. But this is simply the way things are going. Dad shouldn’t be administering his own meds anymore. At all. In her heart she’s realizing this but not fast enough for me. It’s obvious that she is angry that she is going to have to take it over. She resents that he can no longer manage this. She actually resents her whole caregiving life right now, which is just complicating this whole mess.

And then… it’s almost like she’s taking it out on him by not managing it correctly. I can’t tell if it’s laziness or ineptitude, but instead of simply having him drink his slimfast breakfast, she tells him to drink that AND eat two bowls of raisin bran.

Uh.. hello… did you test his sugar after he drink the slimfast? The italics mean I didn’t actually say it.. I just thought it!

Then… she tells me in anger that of course he went back to bed and to sleep for 3 hours. Mom… do you think that’s because his blood sugar might have been out of whack? Then… she tells me she wakes him at noon and yells him to get out of bed and eat. His response was that he wasn’t hungry. Her response was tough… just get out and eat since you took that insulin.

Mom did you test his blood sugar at all during this period?

I didn’t say anything to her about the blood sugar testing. I don’t want her to know that I’m passing judgment. I mean, she is a nurse, she knows the standard of care here. She is just angry. And I think she’s really passive aggressive. Or lazy. I for the life of me can’t figure out which.

I do venture into the land of suggesting an insulin pump. Her response is that they don’t make them that measure the blood sugar too. She said he’s not a candidate. And then she responded “well if he had one of those he would have to test his blood sugar all the time!”

Uh. Yeah. Not a bad thing mom.

So now I’m going to research the latest and greatest in insulin pumps. Cause when you live 3K miles away and you feel like you can do “something” that might improve the messiness.

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