Family = there are no longer any words. Yep they have now made me speechless. I know why you lose your mind as you age. You take care of elderly parents.
Hubs and I got a call from his mother Wed nite. She was highly agitated and psychotic saying she felt a darkness coming over her so she took her blood pressure and it was 260/50 or she got a reading of E which she interpreted as go to the ER (like a machine can tell you that). So I calmly explained the E was an error reading, to make sure she had new batteries in the machine and retake it. So she called back in 10 min and had worked herself up even more, so we told her to call 911and go to the er and we would meet her there. She was protesting because of hub's father - she just didn't know what to do with him (he's had 4 strokes in the past 3 years and he's lucky to know his name let alone anyone else).
So we took off and spent until yesterday afternoon at the hospital ER. Basically she had every orifice examined, probed and prodded, along with heart tests for a possible heart attack and brain scans for a stroke. I said call a psychiatrist. I swear she wanted to be admitted because when they would rule one thing out, she would say something else hurt or she hadn't taken a shit in 4 days, yanno all the bullstuff you knew she was full of.
In the meantime. we are trying to keep his father contained (a struggle itself) and I swear if it wasn't the middle of the night or hubs needed his belt I was going to tie his father to a chair or bed. He would keep getting up and trying to tell us he was going to go on to work. He would bring out a hankie and would say it was his car keys. (He retired in 1985). He wouldn't let me take him home because his mother told him to never go with a stranger (he's known me for 31 years). So I had hubs take him home and put him to bed then a neighbor would watch him for us.
So the end result was she was released to go home. Hubs and I took them home and got them situated. We had already cancelled all patients for the day because we didn't know what was going on so just easier to cancel - besides we had been up all night and we are too old for all nighters.
The reason why she did what she did. well, besides being a PITA, she takes her blood pressure medications when she feels like she needs them and not on any regular schedule. I swear she is doing this to herself purposefully because she is in the role of primary caretaker since hub's father had a few strokes. She was always the pampered taken care of person. Her doctor who I think is a quack and my thinking is backed up by investigations into him, changed her blood pressure medicine because all he saw was the other one wasn't working. He never bothered asking her if she was actually taking it and she didn't volunteer it either. That medicine tends to lower your pulse rate. Her pulse was running in the 40's which is way too low for a 200 pound woman. She had not taken her medicine for 3 days prior and so when she found it was high, took a double dose of the medicine instead of a regular dose. It dipped her pulse but didn't do diddly squat for her blood pressure because by this time she had worked herself up into a tizzy.
So she was sent home on a different medicine which immediately lowered her blood pressure but doesn't affect the pulse as much and she felt 100% better. That is, until she got home and hubs and I sat her down for a good old fashioned blunt talking to. We basically told her that we would be by next week and we were going to look at assisted living facilities for them. That she couldn't handle it and we couldn't trust her to take her medicines so we would have a nurse around all the time to take care of both of them. We found out she was leaving hub's father at home alone (he fell once and couldn't figure out how to get up and laid there for probably more than 2 hours while she was shopping). Another time she left him, she came home to find the oven on and stove top on but nothing cooking and he was in the basement (she had left the gate unlocked). He was trying to get his workbench saw started. I guess after this she started taking him with. Once she left him in the car with the keys. She came back out of the store 20 min later and he was in the drivers side playing with the controls. She's lucky he didn't try to drive. (We found this all out yesterday). We called hub's brother and told him to get his tuckus down to their house and watch them for the weekend. I arranged for a nurse to come by the house 5 hours a day until we can get them into a facility.
So that's been our last 24+ hours. Now I am getting ready to take off for a family reunion (my family). For 3 days I get to spend with my siblings, their spouses, their children, their children's children, my own family, and my parents in a 10,000 square foot air conditioned old farmhouse we rented out that has 10 separate bedrooms, one kitchen, no utensils, no microwave, 1 oven, 4 cooktops, and 1 frig. Anything we want to cook with we have to bring with. But it is nice in that we have exclusive use of 10 acres of land, an inground pool, hot tub, lighted tennis courts and basketball court, horeshoe pits, volleyball net, fire pit, and an indoor game room. Every year there are complainers. Every family has them. Maybe it's the sheer number of people in my family but it always seems somehow my family has more than most. Me? I enjoy my peace and quiet. I also enjoy seeing my nieces and nephews and siblings. I just can't stand the fighting and bickering. There are times I don't know who is the youngest - the actual one that is youngest by age or the one who is acting younger than that.
