Role Reversal. Taking care of your parents!

[chrisinhouston]

I realize this is the Parenting message board but now the roles are reversed and I am parenting my parents. I figure this is a good place to run this thread.

My 90 year old dad is blind but still mobile enough, he does have a slow walk due to a loss of cartiledge in his knees from years of tennis.

My mom is now pretty much an invalid. She no longer has the use of her legs or left arm and hand. She can not sit up on her own, walk or even role over in bed. I now call her by her name, Eleanor, when I get her up in the morning; she no longer remembers who I am or if she even has kids; she mostly remembers my dad though.

My dad gets himself going in the morning, he still shaves himself and dresses and heads down to the kitchen for the breakfast that I or my sister have made; we try not to forget to put the prunes in his fruit bowl, they seem to be real important now!

I wake my mom up and remove her covers which she doesn't like. I try to flex her legs a little, they are getting more stiff now. I change her, not much different then a baby. You learn how to roll the patient to do things like getting pants pulled up and shirts tucked in. When it's cold I dress her in polarfleece pants and a jacket. Because her left arm is paralyized, I got this great idea to take this polarfleece jacket and have it altered, I had them put a zipper on the side from the bottom up through the arm pit and down to the wrist. It makes it so much easier to get that arm in when she is on her back. What's that saying? Necessity is the mother of invention!

I use a Hoyer lift to get her out of bed and into her wheel chair. The lift is kind of like an engine lift, she lays on a webbing like a hammock and the lift attaches to the corners with chains and you crank her up and then let her down into the chair or back to the bed. She can only sit up until lunch time,then it's back to bed and undressing, all in reverse.

She feeds herself ok but she has a tendency to try to eat her napkin or any tissues we leave out. After breakfast my dad listens to tapes for the blind and I put a book out for my mom. We give her a gardening book with lots of pictures, she used to really like to garden a lot. She sometimes reads it, sometimes she just stairs at the pages and reads the same sentence over and over. I read my dad the front section of the NY Times, he especially likes the articles and editorials and op/eds that make Bush out to be an idiot; he is a staunch Democrat. He laments that things have changed so much for the worse since Truman!

Blindness is bad but I wonder if Alzheimer's is worse? I guess they are just both bad. We are lucky because she is a non-typical dementia patient, always happy and never complains and needless to say she is not prone to wondering off. She always compliments me on the cooking saying things like "this is so tasty" and "this is the best dinnner I've ever had." She also tells me how nice I look even when I'm in some old dirty T shirt that I wear for painting or yard work. When I go away from the table she asks my dad, "who is that young man?"

Dad always has tea at 5pm with some cookies and cake; he was British until settling here in 1947. He has a single malt scotch at 7pm with just a little water, you get a lecture if you overwater it. He really likes all kinds of food so we cook all kinds of things, last night we had some really good oysters, tonight I plan to grill a buterflied leg of lamb. We enjoy good wines together. I crash before he does and the day starts all over again the next morning.

I'm ok with all of this, when they are gone I will miss them but they have had rich good lives.

Does anyone else in the celler deal with their parents as caretakers?