Losing a Family Member….

Richter Family-1383-1It’s really tough to deal with the lose of anyone, especially a close family member.  A fried lost a parent and being the child though of a father that is currently suffering with dementia, you are in a tough place. I’ve mentioned before how tough it is to deal with the issue of others grief when you are faced with a parent that is being tortured inside their own body.  It’s bad form to respond in a fashion of – I’d trade places.  You want to try to explain how you are so happy that at least their parent didn’t suffer for a long time being tortured inside their body with a mind that doesn’t quite work right and can’t control their own body.  How great it is that they went quickly as opposed to suffered in a position of not even knowing who you are, while you visit to make sure they are being treated well – all the while wondering if the care facility is just getting them out of bed for meals and that few minutes a week or day you come visit.

Personally I will miss my dad when he is gone, but I also already miss him while he is still here.  There are so many questions that I would love to ask him.  Yet the main part of my conversation comes down to Does anything hurt?  Do you recognize me? Do you want a Pepsi today?

So we remain silent and simply say sorry for your loss….  And I know jokes are told to help lessen the hurt, but probably not taken well…..  It’s just a way to make it through the day, because I do miss my dad, especially when I visit and talk to him.

Another Father’s Day! – More Quality of Life not Quantity?

Another Father’s Day! – More Quality of Life not Quantity?

I’m hoping to come up to see dad this week… As I’ve mentioned my dad has dementia and has had many strokes….

Holidays like father’s day are a little hard, wondering how much he is aware of what day it is? I feel bad for my friends that have lost their fathers, and I also envy the friends that can spend the day with their fathers, and I am so glad my boys have a good relationship with their dad…. but I have to say beRichter Family-1174-1ing in the in between time….seeing your dad suffer through, you are happy you still have your father, but you are sad that your father is in so much pain and confusion. And you (and no one else) can’t make it easier.

My father is actually really young, only going to be 76 next week!  In my dad’s lifetime he has really done a lot and had a lot of funny stories, though he hasn’t been a huge number of places.  My dad did join the reserves in the 60s during one of the wars (or was that a military action)?  He was in California for 6 months for that, and I remember hearing about a trip to New Orleans, but other than that the only other trip I ever remember hearing about was my parents honeymoon – and that was the story of my father of my father talking his way out of a ticket in Georgia and inviting the police office up to their farm to go fishing!

While growing up, I remember the short trips when we were younger to places like Louisville (I got dropped off to stay with friends), Kentucky to pick up a dog named Waldo (we brought back Tobacco leaves to show for show and tell) and St Louis to visit cousins.  My dad also took day trips a few times to pick up cars and animals.

Most of my dad’s stories though involved highjacks he and friends had been involved in at one time or another, or things that had happened while farming.  My dad had an ability to tell a story that everyone loved to hear.  He had stories about everything from building a rock dam across the stream that is now by our house and flooding out the road to driving a tractor with wagon and having a semi try to pass him on a curvy road and lose control.

Dad also was always willing to help anyone that showed up at the door.  People would show up at all hours of the day and night stuck on the road and dad would grab the tractor and pull them out of the snow or mud. Presents would be dropped off, usually a bottle of alcohol – that my dad rarely drank, but sometimes we would end up with an odd thing like a Datsun once with the clutch ripped out.

Growing up dad would hear about or try something and think, oh I need to try that, and off he would go! With that he built a still once – I’ve heard stories about people lined up and even laying under the spicot!  Dad also heard about a man selling off animals and ran off and bought a Fallow deer at one point.  Several years later dad tried a Beefalo burger and decided to try to recreate them.  He and a friend drove across the state and bought two bison!  Each family got one.

My dad lost his mother, my grandmother, in his early teens.  She suffered for a while at home from cancer, and I know it affected him a lot.     My dad would avoid hospitals, saying people die there.  The story he once today, and that’s one he didn’t tell normally was that my grandfather brought in preachers to pray over my grandmother to try to get her better, but nothing worked.  Dad also wasn’t a church going person.  “If you just believe enough”.  All through the eyes of a child, it was hard on him losing my grandmother.

He went on to wreck a motorcycle in his teens and have massive head trauma.  My Uncle Tom was working in a nearby field and noticed, rushing him to the hospital.  My dad was lucky to have survived and had to go stay with my Aunt Dorothy for a while after to take care of him and recuperate.  Yet my dad did still manage to finish school high school.

He then went on to farming, starting with farming others land and working up to buying his own land with my mother after being discharged from the military.

Growing up my dad used every chance he could to play at the same time.  He was extremely inventive with farm machinery too…. I’ve always said we were lucky to survive childhood!  At two my dad made a go cart for me using a drill that was plugged in for a motor.  He would put us on sleds (as toddlers) and pull us behind lawn mowers through the snow, put us in the scoop of the tractor and turn it into a fair ride going up and down while spinning in a circle, and I’ll never forget the nails and things I ran through my foot running around the barn yard.  (The barn had a huge supply of food in it, ie. collection of bunnies)

My dad now only answers questions asked of him sometimes, speaking is difficult for him, and it’s hard to tell what he is really aware of.  He’s in an assisted living facility, which I’m sure to him is just like a hospital that he so hated.  The last time he was in the hospital and fully aware, he removed his own iv and tried to call for a ‘breakout’ ending up in someone else’s room.

So what do you do when you are in the middle ground?  The ground where no one understands except those that are there with you in the same journey? And like them, everyone’s journey is different – dementia takes every person at a different rate and if a different way.  With some you still see glimpses of the person that they once were, and with others you see nothing.  Do they know you?  Some like my dad have a body that is fighting them also.  My dad now won’t use one side of his body due to strokes.  That side of his body is atrophying.  Family may say, I want to remember him as he was, but they also would be the first to be upset if you voice an opinion that he might now want to live in the condition he’s in?  And what to do with the guilt many have allowing the thoughts to creep in that your parent might be better if they give up?  It not politically correct to ever voice those feelings….  and no one understands, those that have lost their parents to some quick illness or accident, especially don’t understand.

How do you explain that what you are really voicing is the fear that your parent is going through torture and your job has become trying to figure out the best way to increase quality of life and not increase quantity of life without them suffering?

 

Lost History – Stolen Cannon

Many years ago – sometime in the 70s I think, some of my cousins came with little cannons they had built.  I remember seeing a little cannon one had.  My dad – as was common with him – said I can do that, and I can do it bigger.  So he ordered two barrels special cast.

Then my dad built a couple big cannons, and not just decorative! He built working cannons to shoot every year.  We would load one up and take it to the family fourth of July party to shoot off, at my cousin Kristi’s every year.

When friends would come over I would love to ask “Do we have gunpowder?”, “Can we shoot it?”.  My dad made sure I know exactly how to load it too.  I still remember the instructions include a dixie cup of gunpowder mixed with flour – it was years later that a chemist friend explained to me why the flour was added.  My dad somehow knew…..  (Flour when put out into the air like that is explosive – don’t ever put flour on a fire)

At my cousins especially we would then search for anything we could find to ‘load’ into the cannon after the paper was tamped in.  I remember everything from sand to even a frog once.  As kids we would run around searching just grabbing anything we could find.  I’ve seen the little holes that sand put through all the tree leaves and I could swear I remember a story about something someone else loaded putting a hole through something once.

As kids we would laugh at all the people who had too much to drink weaving as they were trying to light the fuse, and I’m amazed that no one was hurt as it would jump back several feet in recoil when the cannon would go off.

After shooting the cannon people would drop by from miles away to find out what had exploded.  I think my dad enjoyed shooting it as much as we as kids enjoyed showing it off.  It’s one of the things we can say my dad built himself.  I’m sure whoever took it either had no idea how much it meant to us or didn’t care.  They also are not aware of the history of the cannon.

The cannon itself was in my mother’s yard away from the road.  It weighs a lot, so whoever took it had to have come up her driveway and taken it down the driveway to the road and gotten it into their truck.  It would take at least a couple people.

The cannon does have wheels and a bolt area to allow for it to be towed, but it hadn’t moved in years.  I think the last time I remember my dad shooting it was when my in laws visited almost 15 years ago.

Of course the other thing I see when I look at this camera is how amazing my dad was with just a high school diploma.  My dad could engineer most things given the desire.  He would see them and put them together, the house we grew up in was in a continual state of remodel as doorways moved and relocated as my parents changed their mind.

My dad would also change his mind about where a stocked pond was and decide to move it..  I still remember waking to find our swimming pool filled with bass and catfish one morning (and dirty pond water).  He would clear areas to turn them into fields – including railroad…. So many stories that I’m sure he could tell.

How to get our cannon back though…

Glimpses of my Dad

There are things that they don’t tell you about Dementia…. Like the fact that a dementia home can decide they are refusing to keep a resident any longer. Really they aren’t supposed to do that. But it happens, and it happened to us, recently. Some of the behaviors of dementia are things a lot of people don’t talk about, but they apparently can make some homes throw up their hands and give up.  When you’ve never dealt with this before there isn’t a book on what to then do with your parent, who you turn to for help, where you find a new home for them – and believe me at that point you are totally confused, upset, and in a lot of cases embarrassed.  In our case we were dealing with a nurse that had an attitude also that didn’t really help.

For us the final straw was my father being dropped at an emergency room with the nurse at the dementia ward of the nursing home saying they refused to take him back.  To top all this off they had included lots of things on his papers that made other nursing homes afraid to take him in.  The social worker at the hospital tried to help by calling a few places, my mother called everywhere close, and my dad stayed in the hospital waiting for 6 days.  Not knowing what to do we finally called nursing homes and dementia wards at a further distance away.  We were lucky and found a place 1 1/2 hours away (and I have to say they definitely seem to know what they are doing a lot more than the first place!).  Besides calling other nursing homes I tried other leads, we had been eliminated from the VA because all my father’s active duty was ACDUTRA which apparently disqualified him., so I started calling all the organizations with fancy names that included long term care in their names.

The Association of Long Term Care Nurses for Illinois (or something similar) was nice enough to point me to the Department of Public Health.  It turns out, you are required to be given 30 days notice before being turned out of a nursing home and they have a group you can complain too.  It may not come to anything, but at least I felt better having someone listen.

I just have my mothers stories but the new dementia ward my father is at seems to care more.  The nurses are always seem to be with my dad when my mother visits, there haven’t been all the calls saying he has fallen when he escaped notice anymore.  They put a bed alarm on him to make sure he doesn’t fall at night (this is something the first place said was illegal to do????)

The thing though that brought me to tears was when they brought my dad the phone and dialed my mother when he was concerned about her safety.  It reminded me of the times when my mother and I would be somewhere and my dad would call to tell us that they were having a storm and we needed to find a place to stay so that we would be safe.  – Forget the fact that he was in Illinois and we were in Arkansas at the time, he wanted to be sure we were safe.  That was a few years ago and now having them show the care to help him call to ease his mind really made me feel that was the right place for him…. BUT I also was able to see a small glimpse of my dad again.  Some of the old thought processes were there.  It may not be a lot, but at least it’s something.

 

Another Stroke?

Visiting my family this weekend, a trip to the nursing home to see my dad was part of the visit.  Now that my youngest has started school, and living 6 hours from the rest of my family I’m stuck with just weekends to come and help out.  I’ve been lucky that my mother is still able to take care of herself as much as she is.  This trip my husband and youngest came with and we got to attend a Jurrasic Quest event also.  My youngest was super excited about that.

My dad has still been having issues at the nursing home and we’ve been dealing with – is there another place to put him?  Surprisingly my mother was told that the nursing home he is in has a five star rating and so he needs to move so that they don’t loose their rating.  I’ve been surprised with the number of times they call and tell us that he has fallen.  The stories they tell give the impression that despite being unable to walk without assistance when anyone is watching – he appears to be a super quick ninja the rest of the time and get to places and then fall down when they aren’t looking.  He is on their list to always be watched yet in the last two days he has fallen twice – and once last week so badly that he has fractured his hand…

While in to visit (Before the last two times he has fallen), we noticed on Sunday that he is now dragging his left foot behind him when he walks with a walker.  It appeared obvious to me that he has had a stroke again.  The nurse when questioned, said that he has been like that as long as she has known him, but also mentioned that she only works every other weekend.  I realized that means that this was the first weekend she had ever seen my dad, as he just moved to that section.

My dad’s medicine seems to be making him pretty tired all the time.  It’s pretty sad to see, but even with all that we can see small glimmers of my dad.  Strokes do change behavior and physical characteristics.  Seeing my dad drag his leg, and unable to stay awake to carry on a conversation reminds me that we have moved from the stage where my parents were caretakers to the next step where my brother and I move up to care for our parents (and our kids).