I am sooo glad that i found this site I have been feelng so guilty for being frustrated with my husbands grandmother, for not taking responsibility for herself! First off i would like to say that I know that everyone here is going to think that she has some kind of mental illness but trust me she doesn't, the doctors have told me it is pure lazyness!!!! She moved here in Febuary and I thought ok this will be good for her getting her away from my husbands mother and aunts who have given into her every whim at the cost of her heath for the past 15 years, and his grandpa wasn't much health eather! She has diabetes but no one cared about that they would fill her room up with all kinds of junk food and sugar and anything she wanted just so they didn't have to deal with her. So she moved here with us and I have been watching her diet, NO SUGAR, NO FATTY FOOD! I let her choose once a month a place where she would like to go out for dinner and that is it for the month, which has worked out quite well her pro time and blood sugar is exactly where it is supposed to be....considering when she got here it was over 200!!!!! But the issue is she will not clean herself, she won't walk anywhere if you ask her to take her own plate from her room she just can't even beleive in a million years that she would have to get up off her butt and walk out to the kitchen to put something away! She makes my husbands grandfather do it, who has dementia! I just get so mad sometimes because I try and try over and over to get her to motivate herself and she just refuses there is always an excuse, she doesn't have the right shoes to walk on the wood floor then we get her the shoes and then all the sudden the shoes hurt her feet!!!! The reason she pee's on herself is because of the pills that she takes, which I asked the doctor about and the doctor said nothing she is taking would make her pee uncontrolably like that! Here is the best part she has a hoveround and she is so lazy that she won't even get into that to roll herself out to the kitchen to get herself some water or bring a load of clothes out!!! I don't really know what to do anymore! I feel myself getting more and more frustrated by the day!

SPEAKING OF BEING "RELIEVED" YES THE DEPENDS OR OTHER BRAND NAMED PANTS REALLY HELP!

Oh how happy I am with MB's post!

Yesterday, I was kinda upset about fat people being auomatically named "lazy" especially by that doctor! I have always been painfully thin and I grew up with a best friend who had overweight issues. What a pair, right?

But, she was never lazy at all! In fact she had more energy than I did! I think this is a misconception. Most often it can be a psychological issue to "stuff certain feelings down" or a physiological problem.

I agree with all of MB's advice and I would definitely get her back on track with the antidepressant. She needs to feel mentally better to help the mobiity situation.

Meg, how overweight and how old is she? People who are morbidly obese have loads of ailments, neurological and physical problems related to their weight. It isn't uncommon for people who are obese to have decreased sensation in lower parts of their body (like their bottoms, etc.) simply from the sheer weight of all that tissue pressing on the nerves that control bladder function, bowel function, lower extremity movement and sensation, etc. You know how numb your butt gets when you have been sitting without being able to shift your weight for a few hours? Imagine how numb your fanny would feel if you weighed 2, 3, or 4 times more than you do!!! Diabetes, especially if not well-controlled, also causes kidney difficulties, numbness (peripheral neuropathy) in the feet, etc, so she has a lot of risk factors that could impair her mobility.

Has she been to a urologist to see if there is a reason she has such difficulty with bladder control?

I understand what you are saying and it could be possible that she could be getting dementia but as far as I know she has been this way her whole life, the only thing that has started happening in the past 5 years that didn't before was the peeing, from what I have heard from her kids she sat in a chair and told them to do everything when they were little, they told me she used to yell at them from her chair to come down the stairs and change the channel on the TV for her because she didn't want to get up and do it, and that was when she was in her late 20's, i'm not trying to rule anything out I am just going off of what I have witnessed, she pays her bills just fine, she knows how to pay things over the phone with her credit cards and order things off of QVC, she can tell you anything you want to know about football and baseball and has every phone number possible that you can think of memorized (except her doctors) my husbands grandpa has dementia and I know what it is like, she does those puzzle books with all of the weird crazy number puzzles and she never forgets anything! I think she is depressed and I really honestly think she hasn't been taking her pills that she is supposed to for her depression that is the only think I havn't filled in awhile!

quote:

everyone here is going to think that she has some kind of mental illness but trust me she doesn't, the doctors have told me it is pure lazyness

Meg, if you are referring to dementia, that's not a "mental illness." It's a collection of symptoms caused by a number of physical conditions and neurological diseases.

Although some people ARE lazy, I don't have too much respect for that diagnosis. It's easy to say, but doesn't help the situation. As for having problem with urination, MANY elderly women have trouble holding their urine due to poor muscle tone and the effects of childbirth and gravity on their anatomy who aren't on ANY medications! Again, I don't have much respect for the doctor's blowing off this issue.

There are a lot of details left out here - how old is your DH's grandmother? Does your husdband's grandfather live with y'all? How old is he? Is he her husband or what? You mention that she has a hoveround... is she overweight? If so, how much? Has she had a good geriatric psych workup to determine her level of ability and cognition? Many of the annoying "habits" you describe are also early dementia symptoms...

Eldercare IS very challenging and oftentimes, symptoms of neurological disease processes are initially dismissed as stubborness, laziness and being spoiled. Because it is difficult for family members to know when "won't" has become "can't," it's very important to have geriatric specialists evaluate our LOs.

Hope that tomorrow is a better day for you and her.