Looking into Respite Care

I have resumed looking into assisted living options for my dad.

We have started having hygiene issues which are too hard for me to cope with. There are some things a person can’t tolerate. I no longer believe in-home care will work. I can’t predict when he will have another problem, and he will not tell me when one occurs. By the time I find out about the next event, I’ll have a Herculean cleaning and disposal job ahead of me. Kiss a day and a half goodbye. I can’t afford that kind of time drain, and I haven’t mentioned the health risk to me or the misery of living with filth.

It’s very hard to figure out what to do with a person who has vascular dementia. The disease progresses quickly compared to Alzheimer’s, so what works one month may not work the next. I have been trying to choose among in-home options as well as assisted living.

My dad doesn’t have a temporary or trivial problem. My dad is dying. His condition is fatal, incurable, and irreversible. That has to be a fundamental premise all his care providers have to acknowledge. Doctors have a tendency to avoid talk of death until a patient burdens them, personally. Up until that time, they treat, treat, treat, wasting money, wearing down caregivers, and putting off important decisions until everyone involved is rushed.

Doctors like money, and they don’t like helping people make decisions. A friend of mine interned in a hospital when I was in college, on his way to becoming a very unhappy radiologist. He said he listened to the doctors when he rode the elevators. The young doctors talked about medicine, and the older doctors talked about money.

When I talk to a doctor about my dad’s care, I’m thinking about doing the right thing. I’m sure the doctor thinks about that, too, but he also thinks about the money he will make by ordering additional treatments which he knows have no potential to help. I have to be willing to be assertive with doctors.

If you’re in denial about death, you may find that a doctor will take advantage and agree to charge you for treatments you don’t need. You have to be aware of this unless you want to be milked like a cow before you die.

It’s not just the money. Medical treatment brings other problems. Say my dad gets a back operation and can’t move for six weeks. I’ll have to hire someone to come and deal with him every day. I’ll have to be in charge of whatever regimen he is given while he recuperates. I’ll have to go out and buy new things he needs. I’ll have to wrestle with him every day and make him cooperate with measures the purpose of which he does not remember. That’s not acceptable.

What if his cardiologist tries to give him a quadruple bypass? Guess who will be looking after him while he heals. I’ll get even more behind in my other responsibilities, which are very important. Then he’ll still die in a year or two, from dementia. The doctors would make money. The drug companies would make money. My dad and I would be left holding the bag.

You can’t just accept every treatment doctors offer you. Treatment often makes things much worse. Look at Kanye West’s mother.

My dad is dying, dying, dying. I refuse to pretend it’s not happening, and I hate it when people other people soft-soap me about it. It’s not helpful. He probably has less than two years left. During his remaining time, he will get worse in sudden steps. He will forget more and more people, including me. He may lose the ability to talk. He is already losing the ability to walk, and he will probably become unable to get out of bed. Someone else will have to bathe him and change his diapers while he waits for the end.

I can’t slap him in a facility and expect things to be fine and dandy until he dies. He is losing the capacity to live in his home without major problems, and he will also reach a point where the slight demands of assisted living will be too much for him.

If he deteriorates over a long period, I will have to make a lot of difficult adjustments. If he dies suddenly, whatever arrangements I have made up to that point will suffice, and I will be spared further confusion and effort. I don’t know which of these two alternatives I’m facing.

Last week, he was open to assisted living. He now says he will kill himself if he has to go. Not helpful. It’s not true, either. He would never harm himself. Some people are incapable of that kind of thing, and my dad is one of them. Still, it means he will not do the mature thing, and it means he will make me suffer until he adjusts to his fate.

My current plan is to put him in assisted living for a few days. It’s called respite care. I’ll take him to a nearby facility, which I have already called, and I’ll leave him there while I visit a Christian conference in another city. I don’t know if he’ll like it or not, but that’s not something that has to be considered. Fate doesn’t always give you choices. He has to do this.

I think once he’s there, he’ll realize it’s better than living at home. He’ll have people to talk to and boss around. He won’t have as many challenges as he has here. He’ll be overfed, which he likes.

As always, the resources available to me are very poor. When I Google, I get thinly disguised ads. When I contact people, I get mobbed with sales calls and spam. My dad’s doctors are probably good at treating the sick, but they are not helpful in dealing with patients who will soon be dead from dementia.

I joined an online support forum, but the people there were so obnoxious and self-righteous, I quit.

Even Yelp and Angie’s List don’t help.

On Friday, we will be visiting the place where my dad will be staying while I’m gone. I hope the visit isn’t a circus, but I won’t let his selfishness deter me. I’m going to that conference, and he is going to submit to respite care whether he likes it or not.

I hate to say it, but I look forward to the days when I no longer have to do this. The hardest things to take are the abuse, the lack of gratitude, and the filth, in that order. He called on God for salvation back in September, and things got very peaceful for a while, but since then he has denied his faith, and tension has returned. I think the cause is supernatural. Satan wants me to be angry and forget about love.

Christians are supposed to flee temptation. A person who has had problems with gluttony shouldn’t keep bowls of candy in his house. Abusive people are just like bowls of candy. They tempt. My dad tempts me to be angry. Even if it’s my fault when I give in, it’s still a bad idea for me to be exposed to such a person more than is necessary.

It shows why we’re not supposed to have unequal yokings. I will never have another one unless it is forced on me.