Feel Helpless and Angry
Hello, I'm New: Part time caregiver for my mother, with congestive heart failure . She was always loving, easygoing and kind but she has become (understandably) very irritable, moody, and takes her anger out on me. As an example, she now wants to move to assisted living because she can no longer tolerate the heat and cold temperatures in her apartment (it IS awful and we cannot seem to get anything done about it), and when I told her we would have to look into it to see if Medicaid covers Assisted Living, she told me that I do not understand, she is going to die in that apartment, and I am mean. I sit here in tears because her illness has been very painful for me. She has been in and out of the hospital, she has fallen and been and out of Nursing homes and she has suffered.
I love her and don't want to see her suffer, but I am limited in what I can do. She keeps saying "do you want me to die in this place?". The truth is, I am trying to rally up my brothers to help with all of this but they don't really do anything. I feel so helpless here and it hurts to see her suffer. It seems like I fail her at every turn. She is so angry with me so often that I feel badly about myself. She does not take it out on the others so much though she is starting to get angry at them now, too. But most of the time it is me. getting the brunt of the anger and I try to understand the hardest.
The fact that your mother is "taking this out of you" is not due to her CHF, it's due to her dementia, i.e., her inability to reason. You and your brother need to be on the same page about treatment for her various ills.
Can you get her to a geriatric psychiatrist? And let her do the talking? This will get you a better diagnosis and a better plan for meds. You don't ask if she wants to take antidepressants. You just give them to her with her BP pills.