Dementia is a Bitch

We're now into 2018.

We've been living with my inlaws for a few months and I've started to notice things. I'm home with them all the time so I see things that Laurance wouldn't.

My MIL is forgetting everything, she's repeating herself and she's getting aggressive with everyone. Now, we don't know at this point if it's from alcohol or if it's something else.

She had battled with alcohol most of her adult life.

She was for the most part in a constant drunk state for months before we moved in and in a total drunk state after we moved in. We would get woken up in the middle of the night because she was looking for more alcohol, forgetting that she'd already drank what was in the house and then starting an argument with anyone that told her there was nothing left.

She was convinced we were lying to her and hiding the alcohol from her which caused her to get very aggressive with all of us.

She stopped going to the Dr and leaving the house for any reason.

Just after Easter, we got a call from one of the girls that came in to help with the house cleaning to say that Mum was being taken to the hospital. She couldn't get out of her chair and she was complaining about being in a lot of pain.

Mum had been in and out of hospital a lot in the last year because of a number of falls.

While in hospital, she was put through a medicated detox. That really brought light to the dementia. We had to think about what to do now. We couldn't have her at home again. The constant want and need to drink and be drunk made it difficult for anyone to care for her.

We decided to put her into aged care. We found a bed for her at an aged care facility that wasn't too far from home but was also just around the corner from Laurance at work.

It didn't take long for her to settle in. We had photos of all of us in a frame for her that sat at her bedside. We made sure she had familiar things with her and brought her fresh flowers every few days.

In her early adult years, my MIL did a lot of stage performances. She starred in theatre productions of Damn Yankees, My Fair Lady, plus many more, and even out performed Dame Edna on stage.

I would sit with her and have her tell me about the theatre and her different performances. A conversation between her and I from day 1 had always broken out at some point into a some from a musical.

She'd been in aged care for only a couple of weeks when she developed a UTI (which is very common in aged care facilities) and was taken back to hospital for treatment where she spent 10 days.

Once back in aged care, she fell back into her new routine. One day she kept talking about a fall she had. We spoke with the staff and there was nothing on record about her having fallen. She then started complaining about pain in her right leg. We noticed some swelling but that could have just been from not being very mobile or active.

About a week later (we're now into June 2018), we get a phone call from the hospital. Mum's been brought in there with a broken femer. Because of the dementia, they can't treat her properly at our little country hospital in Katoomba so they need to transfer her to Nepean Hospital in Penrith.

At some point during the hospital transfer, she bumped her leg and turned the fracture into a compound fracture so now she needs surgery to fix it.

They've done blood work at Nepean and found that she's got an E.Coli bacterial infection. The same strain as the UTI she had been treated for in hospital just a couple of weeks earlier. Because of that, they can't do the surgery as it could cause the infection to spread. They start to treat it aggressively through IV antibiotics and place her leg in a metal contraption to stop her from being able to move it.

It's been a couple of weeks now and the antibiotics aren't helping. They've gone in and surgically cleaned the open fracture and surrounding areas every few days to reduce the risk of the infection spreading further, but it already had...long before she had even gotten to hospital. The infection attached itself to her prosthetic knee which meant that it was never going away.

To put her through a surgery of that magnitude was not going to be good for her at all. It would have been too much stress on her body and her already fragile mind. We weighed out our options and decided to allow them to amputate her leg to mid thigh. It was not a decision we came to lightly and it weighed heavy on us for a long time and still does.

They amputated her leg in mid July.

The night after the surgery, my MIL managed to remove the surgical dressings and had her hands in the open wound. They put her back in for emergency surgery the next morning to clean it back out and take off a bit more of the dead tissue and redress it.

By putting her hands into the stump, she's now caused herself to become septic.

It's been a week since the amputation and she's declining fast. Her kidneys are now functioning at a 20% capacity. She's sleeping more often than not and when she is awake, she's in a different world.

She recognises us but doesn't know who we are. She keeps asking about her parents both of whom have been gone for many, many years.

After a meeting with the Dr's we've decided to put her onto the Palliative Care list. Her organs are slowly shutting down one at a time.

We managed to get her into the Palliative Care unit in Katoomba which was much closer to home for us and made it easier for my FIL to go visit her too.

She showed a bit of improvement while in Katoomba. She recognised us and knew who we were. She was however, hallucinating big time.

They say that when you're dealing with someone that has Dementia, it's always best to go along with what they're saying so not to upset them or confuse them...to them, what they're seeing and saying is their reality.

I've dealt with many things in my life. I've watched family members go from healthy today to skin and bones because of Cancer the next day. I watched my grandfather, my mother's best friend, and 2 of my aunts whither away. It doesn't get any easier.

My MIL held on for a month in Palliative Care. Laurance and I had planned her funeral once we put her into Palliative Care. I've been on both sides of it and pre-planning it is always best. As morbid as it may seem, it's the only way you're going to get everything done that you need to do and do it with some sort of a level head.

Denise Mary Petkevitch (Johanssen) died on 14 August 2018.

She was a loud and colourful personality. She loved her vibrant colours, patterns and flowers. Music and theatre were a big part of her life so we made sure she had a send off that she would have loved.

We instructed those coming to the funeral to wear bright, vibrant colours. Her coffin looked like a piano and her flowers were the brightest of colours we could get.

We had a small wake afterwards with just the closest of family and friends where we told stories about her.

One of my favourite times with her was our girls lunches. Her and I always tried to have a girls lunch at least once on every visit before I moved there.

I remember one of our lunches together. Laurance had just gone back to work after breaking his leg. Her and I were at the pub in Blackheath having a glass of wine with our lunch and having a chat like we always did.

She asked me about helping Laurance while his leg was broken. We were the only 2 ladies in the pub....it was full of old buzzards who kept looking at us funny for being there.

Mum turned around and said, "with these looks that we're getting, you'd think I've been sitting here screaming PENIS every 5 seconds".

That was it, I bust a gut laughing and the old buzzards minded their own businesses after that.

I find myself often thinking about her and how she welcomed me into her family long before she had ever met me on my first trip here in 2013.

Even though she wasn't at our wedding, she was as she put it "happier than a pig in shit" that I married her son and was officially part of her family.