Hey, it's October SOMEWHERE. Bitchtoberfesterama

The BBQ Pit
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Fuck my life.

I should probably just start a thread about this, but I haven’t the heart.

Yesterday, while running errands for my mom - buying a new suitcase for her trip to Kansas, picking up groceries, and taking extra money out for my dad at his request - I managed to lose the $30 extra I’d gotten at the cashier’s somewhere in the store parking lot. I’d been distracted, because there were people behind me in line, I had a cart and heavy bags to deal with. I just wrapped the cash in the receipt, and stuck it in my pocket.

By the time I got home, it was no longer there.

I went back out to my car and searched through it, on the chance that the money had fallen out in the car, but no such luck. I felt awful. I gave Dad back his ATM card, told him how much I’d spent total, plus the now forever-gone $30. I explained what had happened to the cash and apologized. I still felt awful. He almost asked me to go back to the shopping center and scour the three acre parking lot. He wanted to, but when I pointed out that it was Sunday, that I now had no idea where I’d parked, and that someone had almost certainly picked it up by then, he let it go.

Except he didn’t.

Dad is practically deaf, and one of the downsides (aside from having to keep my door closed if he’s watching tv), is that he has no idea how loud he is. Almost every day, I overhear him making comments I have no business hearing. This is one of the reasons I know his overall opinion of me is . . . not especially complimentary.

And not ten minutes ago, I heard him talking to my mom about expenses - bills, her trip, and the purchase of the suitcase - and he mentioned the $30 I’d lost. Except, he doesn’t believe I lost it. He thinks I kept it.

My father thinks I stole $30 from him.

My father believes I am a thief.

It took me a good ten seconds to process this, and by then, Mom had rerouted his conversation. For another five seconds, I was all ‘wait, what? That makes no sense! If I’d wanted money, I’d have gotten his $30 and then gotten out MORE money for myself! And he’d never know!’ That was when I realized that this had nothing to do with logic.

My father is now showing signs of paranoia, another symptom of dementia.

I just want to put my head down and cry.

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Oh pouka, I’m so sorry.

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I really am sorry, phouka. I have no advice, just sympathy.

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I am so sorry, phouka. Why don’t you replace the $30? I mean, even if it makes you tight money-wise, I’d think it’d be worth it.

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I’m sorry Phouka. :frowning:

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That does mightily suck, phouka. Is there a local support group for family of people with dementia? It might help to be able to talk this through with people who understand how you’re feeling and what issues you’re dealing with.

Here are a couple sources of online support:
Dementia Support Group
DASNI- Dementia Advocacy & Support Network Int’l

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That might make it even worse, unless phouka can convince him she went back to the parking lot and found it. As it is, after saying it’d be too much trouble to go back to the parking lot, if she showed up with the $30 that would just convince him she didn’t lose it, she just kept it, even if she says it’s to replace what was lost.

It’s not a fun situation at all.

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And to be frank, if his short term memory really is going he won’t remember this tomorrow. :frowning:

My dad had dementia, and it was so hard to see. He hid it for a long time, but he also became more paranoid, and heaven forbid you change anything in his routine. His routine was his lifeline, if he could hold onto that he could function. Mess with it and he was lost and so very angry. Heartbreaking to watch, even more heartbreaking having to trick him into assisted living. I hated to do it, but both Sister and I lived too far away to be any use, plus we had the same problem as Phouka - we were his daughters, we couldn’t be expected to manage him and his affairs, even though he often bragged about how well we were doing in our own lives. Thank god he’d given us POA when he was younger and saner, made a horrible situation smoother.

449

Ugh to Facebook people. I belong to a small local group on there, started up by my boyfriend as a way to keep in touch with people and do group things where the group varies. It’s nice, things come up and we go or don’t and (usually) have fun.

Well someone just posted up a thing about let’s go play pool at the bar, meet here at this time this Sunday, how about it? Great, fine, fun but with the way life is right now, last minute things are a no go, most especially because my final is just over two weeks away.

So I send my regrets, sorry can’t make it this is why (I probably could have left it off but ok it’s out there now, not like I hide how crazy life can be) and I get a reply back ‘Thanks for the info but I was only looking for people who were coming’.

Fine then.

I guess I’m butthurt about it but like I said it’s a small group (about a dozen people or so) and it was an invitation, and it’s only polite to decline if you can’t make it. I wasn’t the only person to say sorry no, but it being a new post there wasn’t many comments yet (two).

Feels like a smackdown for being polite and if it were a larger group I’d have said nothing but with such a small group isn’t it better to say sorry can’t come rather then have the potential butthurt from her that everyone ignores her ideas?

Bah, just silly silly and I’ll forget it soon but annoying.

450

I generally like animals, you know? But this week the raccoons are doing this which is bad enough, and now we have beavers taking down immature trees and leaving them in the middle of our road. (I live on a private road with just 3 houses). Two trees in the past five days, both with the tell-tale gnaw pattern that says beavers instead of wind. I’m afraid that someone isn’t going to notice a small downed tree after dark and damage their cars going over it.

Idiot beavers, the river is across the highway 300 yards away! You can’t drag the trees over there, so why don’t you knock them down over there to begin with??

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Phouka, I’m so sorry to hear about your father. Unfortunately I know what it’s like to watch a loved one slip away because they’re in denial about their health. My father was a diabetic, and he thought that he could eat whatever he wanted to so long as he injected enough insulin. He had several surgeries to remove parts of his feet, and we don’t know if it was a blood clot from being inactive after the surgeries or the developing heart failure that killed him. Either way, he was dead at 59 and it could’ve been prevented if he had just listened to the damn doctor. That was two years ago, and I still miss him every day.

::hug from me::

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It’s not that I’m tight on money, Anaamika, it’s that I’m completely broke. Currently, my parents are paying my bills. See, I moved in with my parents to help, but I’ve also got health problems of my own, and I haven’t been able to work dependably for the last year. I’ve cashed out my retirement, but I won’t see that money until December. In the meantime, I’m taking computer classes so I can find something better than tech support, maybe even some freelancing so I can work from home. Cross your fingers for me.

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Sorry about your Dad, phouka.

My mother has been delusional for don’t-ask-me how long, it’s part of her basic makeup, so the Bros and I sometimes joke that if she ever gets dementia we won’t be able to tell. She now has “good hearing (for her age)” (her friend with the same diagnosis got a hearing aid and loves it, Mom claims those are “for old people”… uh… 71 ain’t 'zactly young) and shows two different kinds of volume problems, sometimes within a single sentence: either I need to tell her to speak up, or to remind her that I’m right there. Combine the first with her love for speaking while looking away and with her increasing tendency to incomplete sentences (never mind starting halfway through a story) and getting relevant information can be a pain in the ass. “I’ll have a rice with mumblemumble” “sorry Mom, a rice with?” “I’ll have a rice with mumblemumble” “Mom, we’re in a rice restaurant, the part I didn’t get was the last word” “OH! WITH LOBSTER!” “ok Mom, I’m sure the kitchen appreciates the early warning”

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Phouka, I too am so sorry for what you’re going through right now. I watched my grandmother go through dementia. It’s horribly sad.

My grandmother never remarried after my grandfather died. She lived about 40 years longer than he did, but he was the love of her life. For a short time, maybe six months or so, her mind got stuck and she was reliving his death as though it had just happened.

She also forgot that she’d quit smoking years prior and started stealing cigarettes. She was sneaking the smokes and she had to be watched like a hawk. She was not careful about disposing of the lit butts.

However, she also forgot that we (my siblings and I) weren’t her favorite grandchildren, so she was actually nicer to us than she was before she got sick. You just never know.

Anyway, I wish you the best. I hope things improve for you and your family soon.

And Flutterby, I’m with you. Your facebook friend sounds ill-mannered to me.

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USA Today once asked me to work for less than minimum wage. Dubow should be shot. And eaten.

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Not just that, but like other people have said, he’d probably just forget, anyway. Fingers, toes, and everything else crossed for you, Ok? (I look like a pretzel! :slight_smile: )

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On our walk from our house to the mall, we counted 72 Tim Horton’s cups* thrown away along the way. I’ve come to the conclusion that drinking their [del]crack[/del] coffee makes people into ignorant, littering a-holes. My favourite ones were the ones on the ground two feet away from a garbage can. What the hell is the matter with people, indeed.

*We also included other Tim Horton’s garbage, but the vast majority were cups.

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Well, for those interested in my on-going drama, it turns out that Mom hadn’t actually been listening when Dad did his paranoid ramble. Last evening, I was helping her set up my netbook so she could take it with her on her trip to Kansas. She got a little snippy, I snapped back, then apologized and explained why I was in such a rotten mood.

She got real quiet. Then, she apologized on Dad’s behalf, and we talked for a few minutes about his slide into dementia. She assured me that not only did she completely trust me with access to their money, but that the ATM card was actually safer with me than with either of them, based on the number of times they’ve misplaced it.

A few minutes later, she went downstairs for something, I got distracted by an episode of Criminal Minds (ah, Agent Hotchner, let me just rub that tension out of your shoulders . . .), and a significant time later, both came upstairs, and . . . Dad apologized to me.

It was, I think, the third time in my life, he’s ever apologized to me. He couldn’t even repeat what he’d said, just acknowledge that he’d “said some things.” He admitted to having a problem with paranoia, and he asked if I could forgive him, which of course I could.

I think that’s the first time in my life he’s ever asked me to forgive him.

Mom told me later that, dementia or no dementia, he does not get to say stuff (if it had been any person other than my mom saying this, another noun would have been used) like that and not be aware of the consequences.

Today’s “Go, Joe!” brought to you by: Do NOT piss Mom off. She will rip you a new one, and it doesn’t matter if you’re 83 or not.

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Damn, phouka, that is six kinds of awesome. Rock on, phouka’s Mom.

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Rock on, **phouka’s ** mom, indeed.

So at the library, the clerk gave me attitude because she was busy talking with an old lady instead of doing her job, then at the grocery store a clerk gave me attitude because I put my basket on the bin she had just cleaned, then the price of our supper item came up wrong at the self-checkout and I had to go over to customer service and wait for them to look it up and fix it up, etc, BUT - supper was free because they had the price wrong in the computer. Ha HA - take that, everything going wrong afternoon!