This poignant piece details the emotional and practical challenges faced by a daughter whose mother's life has been irrevocably altered by dementia.
Though my mother is still alive, the mom I have is like an alien to me. Dementia has robbed me of the woman who was my best friend for more than 50 years. I grieve the loss of what I call “my real mom” especially hard during the holiday season. Two years ago, my mom experienced an episode of medication-induced psychosis. She was hospitalized for 50 days in a medication-resistant stupor from which she could not emerge and nearly died twice in the ICU. But she survived.
Unfortunately, the damage done to her brain from this trauma left her with permanent cognitive impairment — frontotemporal dementia. She was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder during that stay, at the age of 79. This was her third psychotic episode caused by medication throughout her life, each one worse than the last. Now, her brain showed permanent damage. Our relationship immediately flip-flopped when I became responsible for her care. The night I picked her up from the police station as she had abandoned her car in the middle of the road to get out and look at the stars is never far from my mind. She had been missing for hours and had been acting more and more peculiar for weeks since she started the new medication. I hospitalized her, thinking that as had happened before, once the drug left her system in about 10–14 days, she would be back to normal. That’s not how it went. After she was eventually discharged, she had to go to a rehab facility to relearn how to talk, drink, eat, and walk. She now lives in a memory care facility as I am physically unable to care for her many challenging needs. I also work and have a child to care for while managing the many aspects of mom’s life: her bills, her four moves in two years, doctor visits, therapies, coordinating her care, her medications. Despite using a rollator walker, she’s fallen four times. Most recently, she hit her head so badly she needed several stitche
Dementia Cognitive Impairment Bipolar Disorder Family Caregiving Elderly Care
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