Decisions

MARIE: I hate the person I have become. I realize that I am severely stressed now, perhaps mildly depressed too. It’s making me care for Jon in a way that I don’t approve of. I am too emotional, cry to often and get angry too easily. I am ashamed of myself, yet although I know exactly what it takes to mend the situation, I have had such resistance in me against taking the next step. And plenty of resistance from Jon, too.

It’s harder and harder for Jon to be alone now. He wouldn’t agree and calls me controlling and overprotective, while I say his lack of self awareness on this point is part of the dementia. But it’s true, he’s often fine on his own – the trouble is that we can’t rely on him being fine every time. Part of my reluctance to return home is that I don’t know what I’ll find when I open the door.

Things go wrong all the time, big things and small things, things that matter and things that don’t. It’s not each individual mishap that grinds me down, it’s the sum total of them. And a fairly new complication is that Jon has taken to claiming that mishaps were not mishaps at all, but intentional experiments or somebody else’s fault. (Apparently this is textbook avoidance behavior, but that doesn’t stop it being a total windup at the end of a demanding day.)

We cannot go on like this, so we have boldly taken the next step. After a long and very helpful chat with our local dementia consultant, we have decided to start looking for a nursing home for Jon. One central question the consultant asked Jon was, would he rather have a happy wife who visits him often, or an angry, worn-down wife who nags at him all the time? The advice from all sides, which few people seem to take, is to make the move while the person moving is still well enough to make decisions about the place and to get to know the other residents and the staff – rather than wait until both the sick person and the carer are so worn down that the smallest disaster can force them into a hurried, traumatic move from which neither of them ever truly recovers.

Jon and I will try to be sensible about this. We’ll look at various options over the next weeks and then decide where he will apply. It will most likely be quite a few months before a place is offered, but starting early means we can afford to wait for a really good unit.

Knowing that we have taken the first step down that road is a source of sadness and disappointment, because it was NOT supposed to be like this. But at the same time it is a relief and a weight lifting from, I think, both our shoulders. Maybe it also helps that I’ve just started on anti-depressants. I’ve always said that I wasn’t about to start taking drugs because my husband was ill, but I think I need a little relief to carry me through the next several months. Wish us well, we need it.