My dad celebrated his 79th birthday yesterday. I spoke to him and my mom on the phone (I live in Nevada; they live in Ohio) My brother and his family stopped by to pick my parents up to take them to Boston Market for his birthday dinner. My mom was ready but said my dad wasn’t feeling well and wouldn’t be going. Then, my dad came down the stairs. He was sweaty, short of breath and said his left side was numb. His heart was racing and he had taken his BP with his gadget and, well, the top number was 170–I’m not sure about the bottom.
My brother proceded to spend his evening trying to get my dad to go to the emergency room. My dad refused. He said the weather was so hot and humid and he was laying down on his side (hence the numbness). My brother asked him to set up an appt. sometime next week to see a doctor during office hours. No dice. My brother got back to his house after midnight feeling pretty low and useless because my dad wouldn’t listen to him. I haven’t heard anything, so I assume my dad is still alive.
My dad has a history of eccentricity. When I was a kid, he wouldn’t have a phone in the house…We lived next door to his mother and she would call on a intercom phone to tell us if anybody was there.
His is an extreme packrat…saving every piece of mail, catalog, magazine that comes to him.
My mom who is 72, needs knee surgery—she can hardly walk, yet he has done nothing but strongly discourage her from getting it. He told her that most people that have knee replacements are worse off than before they have it. (I know, Mom could go and do this without his blessing…that’s a separate issue.)
They live on 5 acres…not a farm, but a park like setting. My brother and I think they should sell off the property and get an assisted living condo. I know how that idea will go over…Sometimes I wonder why I live 2000 miles away from these people…then, things like this happen and I remember.
Does all this make him certifiably nuts? I think he sounds eccentric, but interestingly so. The issue with your mum’s knee is worrisome though.
Agreed. Being an idiot about his own health is one thing, but it seems like his insistence on his bizarre knee-related ideas is really affecting your mom’s quality of life. That sort of surgery has really improved in recent years. My grandmother got both her knees replaced last summer, and she’s quite happy with them, with a lot more mobility and a lot less pain.
Thank you for your replies. I guess “nuts” is too strong a word. I’ll stick with “eccentric” and “excessively frugal” for now. I was a little distraught yesterday because his health is much worse than he believes it to be, and I would like him to live longer.
My cousin, who is like a sister to me, told me it’s possible that he has congestive heart failure to some degree and he was having an episode. I guess that’s possible.
You’ll find a lot of elderly people are ‘excessively frugal’ due to their upbringing- quite often they had very little and had no choice. As for their health, they can be strange in the sense of not wanting to visit medico’s due to what they may be told.
Is your Dad not going and discouraging your Mum from the knee operation because of cost or other reasons?
Um, ignoring symptoms of a stroke or other possible major cardiac ‘event’ goes a little beyond eccentric in my book. If he’s being this neglectful of his health, then he’s not capable of living on his own. If he can’t care for himself, he needs someone else to do it for him.
Personally, I plan to put my parents in a home as soon as I can manage . . . do they have to be in declining health to get them put somewhere?
My mom has had a few bouts of heart problems over the years. My dad’s reaction each time has been very similar - he’ll accept it once the doc says there is a genuine problem, but he is always trying to downplay the seriousness of it. It’s a bit frustrating, because my mom does have the ability to be a drama queen at times, which only fuels his denial. One time my mom complained about this attitude to her attending cardiologist (while I was around, but not my dad). Her cardiologist made an interesting comment - he said that in his experience, men tended to downplay their wives’ illnesses because they were afraid to face the possibility that their wife might become seriously disabled, or even die, before they did. Maybe in the mind of the OP’s dad, knee surgery presents some unacceptably high risk, and he’s afraid he’ll lose her on the operating table or through complications afterward. I would agree, though, that the matter really needs to be “removed” from his control and/or influence, for his wife’s sake.
It also sounds as though his own behavior needs to be examined more closely, to make sure that there isn’t some real mental deterioration beneath his squirreliness. It would not be a picnic to handle it this way, but if he has another episode like the one described, perhaps the OP’s brother can go ahead and call for an ambulance, and have the paramedics assess him on the spot. Maybe having a neutral third party tell him that his health is in trouble and that he has to go to the hospital NOW will give him the push he needs to allow himself to be evaluated more fully.
Lots of guys (me included 
) often deny the importance of serious problems to save themselves the hassle of lost time and money.
If you say there’s no problem, then maybe there is no problem.
Never underestimate the power of denial.
Nope. My mom went and signed herself up for the waiting list at an assisted living facility. While she’s in good health now and can manage on her own just fine and dandy, she doesn’t want to still be on a waiting list when she needs the “assisted” part.
Essentially, she’s putting herself in a home. Go figure.
This is wise. A lot of these communities bill that they offer “continuity of care,” which essentially means that they have independent living apartments, assisted living units and skilled nursing units, and patients can move up and down the scale as their symptoms demand. However, most of them also have a clause that says that they have to be in good health when they move in, and stay so for X months, before they can take advantage of this. I know several elderly people who moved into such a facility (which isn’t cheap) only to discover that they had to pay extra for outside care because they had put off moving in until they did need assistance.