The Emotional Torture …
… of sharing my home with a dementia sufferer & her love
Theme: The Beauty
Milly’s love affair with the Daily Mail gives me precious peace and quiet.
Dementia care, marriage and Netflix - what could possibly go wrong?!
A new experiment: I’m turning The Comic’s dramatic headlines into my own dementia-care stories.
Headlines from The Comic: The Dementia Diaries
I’ve decided that The Comic is going to provide the headlines for my next few blogs.
The Comic is what my father used to call the Daily Mail. He was a man we all hugely respected and loved - and apparently he had very strong views about newspapers!
Milly calls it simply my paper. She has an indestructible love affair with it.
She reads it. Then she reads it again. She can spend hours with it, happily revisiting the same stories, particularly anything involving the royals.
And I have become an unwilling expert in double-page features, especially on pages 14 and 15.
Celebrity scoops, red-carpet photographs, West End theatre, British television gossip - apparently they all require repeated consideration.
And then there is Femail.
Milly skips the fashion and beauty pages and heads straight for the dramatic relationship disasters, health dilemmas, painful politics and deeply personal confessions.
In other words, the stuff that makes you wonder whether anyone in Britain is having a normal life.
Which brings me to my first borrowed headline:
“The Emotional Torture of…
…sharing my home with a dementia sufferer and her love.”
My husband and I had been caring for Milly while she lived in her own home for around five years. After my father died, it became very clear just how much he had been doing for her.
Fortunately, she lived only five minutes from us, and we settled into a reasonably manageable routine.
Then Milly fell and broke her leg. Being an ex-nurse, I had always planned that, if the time came, I would try to care for Milly myself. We had even converted our old garage into a little respite room - originally with the idea that she could come and stay when she needed us.
Suddenly, the respite room became rather more permanent.
We were told that Milly was likely to be housebound for the rest of her life and that walking would be difficult to maintain. Basic nursing care, determination to keep my marriage intact, and a fair amount of stubbornness turned things around and eighteen months later, Milly is doing remarkably well.
Ménage à quatre
We had only recently become empty nesters. Our two daughters were independent and settling down.
Hurrah! We were getting used to our space, our routines and our evenings and then there were four of us again.
My husband. Me. Milly.
And The Comic.
Noises from the Bedroom
I know my husband sometimes wonders how he got here. He certainly doesn’t enjoy hearing the sounds of this new relationship.
A cough.
A sneeze.
The bang from the walking frame.
Something being knocked over - precisely as we have finally sat down to watch the new streaming blockbuster we’ve been waiting all day to see.
The tension in the room can be quite something! I wonder whether the Daily Mail is thinking of a Femail feature called:
“My mother interrupts my husband’s moment of pleasure for the 99th time.”
If it does, I’m available for comment.
The Torture of a Trolley
He also likes as little evidence of therapeutic living as possible. The trolley - the little table on wheels that goes everywhere with Milly - the wheelchair, pads and creams must stay in Milly’s space once she’s in bed.
I understand. This is our home - although it’s now Milly’s too. She just doesn’t know it yet.
She regularly asks when she’s going home. Or when we are. That’s a great one for my husband to answer!
The Daily Mail Effect
So I still call it The Comic and I still like Harry and Meghan - and feel rather sorry for them, actually - but I’m beginning to appreciate its services. Milly can spend hours reading it and if she is occupied and happy and has something to look forward to every day - then my life is so much easier. And I am free for long periods of time.
In fact, it’s on her care plan!
Daily Mail: once daily, repeat as required.
And so begins my latest bit of fun - always looking for ways to relieve the tedium of a care routine.
Sorry, Milly, but it can be so boring!
For the next few blogs, I’m going to take one of The Comic’s headlines and see what happens when I apply it to the rather less glamorous reality of caring for someone with dementia.
Because if the Daily Mail can turn living with an ex-husband and his new lover into “emotional torture”, surely there is something in there for the rest of us.
More to come!