My husband and I live with and care for his 91-year-old mother, who is suffering from some dementia, though she is still fairly high-functioning. She also had her disabled daughter pass away last spring, so I imagine grief is possibly magnifying it. She has been exhibiting some behaviors that I would call OCD.
1) She obsessively picks at her scalp to the point where all her hair has been pulled out.
2) She cooks and cooks and cooks. Not in any normal way, but HUGE amounts, far more than the household can eat, and often with strange amounts of ingredients: two sticks of butter in a small pan of fish, 10 bay leaves in an 8x8 pan of corn/celery/onions. So she puts it in the fridge, then the freezer, then the garbage. There are other non-cooking kitchen projects too, such as filling numerous large containers with filtered water from the Culligan tap and leaving them on the counter.
No amount of reasoning with her seems to work. She will verbally agree with what we're saying, but can't seem to stop the behavior. On the cooking, this one is getting expensive, plus she's already hurt herself a couple of times (a minor knife cut to the thumb; cuts to her foot from dropping a bottle of olive oil on it, etc.). She's also caused a dreadful flood in the kitchen by plugging up the sink and running the water, then walking away and forgetting about it. We took pictures so we can occasionally refresh her memory about that one.
Anyway, I'm just wondering if anyone else has had similar experience with their elderly loved one. And what has worked in dealing with or modifying their behavior? So far, we have hidden all knives and drain plugs... ;-) But talking to her about our concerns only seems to produce irritation.
TIA... Loads of blessings!
You cannot reason with a person with Dementia. They have lost that ability. Also, the ability to process and comprehend. At this stage she should never be alone.
We also got her back in touch with a long-standing love of hers: jazz music. We got it playing from her phone on a bluetooth speaker and she seems to enjoy that.
Thank you for taking the time to respond. I feel less alone already. :-)
Best of luck to you!!!
Re: medication, we found out that she WAS taking Donepezil, but for whatever reason, her home health nurse had stopped it. The lady who comes in each day to assist her said it had helped when she was taking it before, so we immediately got a refill and got that back in the med box, as of last night. I think it has already taken the edge off her agitation. I guess the next step would be some kind of sedative or tranquilizer if needed.
We also got her back in touch with a long-standing love of hers: jazz music. We got it playing from her phone on a bluetooth speaker and she seems to enjoy that.
Thank you for taking the time to respond. I feel less alone already. :-)
We also kept all kitchen knives stored in the back of a bottom cabinet, which while not convenient for us kept them out of his reach. He had talked about needing a knife or scissors to make his buttonholes larger since he wasn't able to button them. I also had to tape the temperature controls in the fridge in place since and labeled them do not touch. He had turned them all the way up or down a several times when he first moved in with us resulting in frozen produce or thawed frozen foods.
We made a bit of a thing out of me not wanting anyone to touch anything in my kitchen, which wasn't really a huge thing for me, but it was an easy therapeutic fib to keep him safe and us sane. It depends on whose house you're in though to make that fib work.
We also dealt with OCD and panic attacks. I don't recall now which meds were tried, but nothing really worked. What helped most was a fairly rigid routine. We left a large sheet of paper with the sequence of things that would happen each day - time to get up, breakfast, time that the caregiver would come, lunch, when we would get home, dinner, bedtime. That seemed to help. We would talk him through slow breathing to get through the panic attacks.
I wish you well. An old expression that often came to mind for me was that caregiving is a long row to hoe.
Thank you for taking the time to respond. I feel less alone already. :-)