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littlemisskitty Asked June 2017

How do you help an elderly person who does not want help?

I care for my grandma who is 87 years old with dementia. She's a diabetic so has to eat and has many pills to take due to various conditions. She's in reasonable health in that she's still using the toilet and staying dry, able to eat, walk, talk, even carry on conversations on her good days but she has terrible mood swings. By mood swings I mean the slightest thing sets her off so she's literally swinging mad beating up myself, herself, and anything else she can get her hands on. Eating is a huge issue as she has to eat being a diabetic and yet sometimes she loves her food and feeds herself and happily comments on how good the food is but the next she's refusing to eat, throwing the food around and hitting me at the slightest offering of food. How does a person stay calm and are there any tips for having eating time be successful? Also pills are sometimes a problem. Sometimes they are happily taken without an issue and other times she holds them in her mouth to dissolve them. This can set her off from eating but if I do it after she eats, then she's holding pills in her mouth burning sores into her tongue (I've never seen sores but one time recently for two days she said her tongue was sore. I had her rinse with mouth wash for mouth sores to help and it seemed to heal it right up.) I use dissolving tylenols at night and liquid advil as well at night but during the day she's on pills. Any suggestions to help with this besides using yogurt, oatmeal or applesauce to get them down? She just chews everything even without having tons of teeth. It's nuts how much she can chew even with only having her front teeth on the bottom and a full denture on the top.

CTTN55 Jun 2017
"she's literally swinging mad beating up myself, herself, and anything else she can get her hands on. "

Please don't put up with physical abuse! Why are you the one stuck taking care of her?

JessieBelle Jun 2017
littlemisskitty, diabetes adds another urgency to caregiving. We can't just let them not eat. And we can't just let them not take their insulin or pills. It ties us in to a tighter schedule of what we have to do. Fortunately, my mother is good at taking her shot and pills, though I often have to nag her to get it done. It wears me out. Each night I get spiel about how she doesn't know why she's taking the pills and they don't do any good. Of course, I know that she is 90 years old with multiple problems that would have probably ended her life years earlier without the pills.

I don't know how your grandmother can stand to chew the pills. If they are not dangerous to chew I wouldn't worry. I would just have her a pleasant drink to chase them. We do what we can with what we have to work with. It sounds like you are doing an excellent job, though I know you're ready to put on your caregiver helmet so you can bump your head on the wall. No one ever warned us how trying it would be.

Which pill is it that burns her tongue. I wonder if there is something that would keep that from happening (other than her swallowing it right away.)

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