Sandra talks about Mum being in hospital with dementia

Sandra, your mum had dementia and it was a difficult time for you, I know, and she was in hospital. Tell us about your experience in your own words. On the whole, the experience is good for what you can get out of it. Unfortunately, the staffing levels for that particular illness is, it's not important enough because it's to do with the brain and whilst, and you can't do nothing with dementia, it just goes, you know, they go slowly, they go more and more downhill, so there's not the facilities to deal with people with dementia. So your mum was taken in for an aneurysm just in terms of, you know, people were worried day might have been growing rapidly and making her own well. But the experience that you had with your mum as an inpatient was that the dementia was a difficult problem or difficult condition to get to grips with. Yes, yeah and when we actually went to hospital there were certain things mum couldn't do so we relayed that to the staff and unfortunately because people are busy they don't listen so we didn't know half of what went on with mum and it made her really ill unfortunately. She lost a lot of weight while she was in? Yes and that's because she was she had something that she had to go into a side room and we all said mum has to be encouraged to eat otherwise she won't eat and they didn't feed her and but they didn't convey that to us they didn't say to us your mum's not eating, otherwise we would have gone in and we would have sat with mum and we made sure she ate something to eat, but we weren't told that and she lost a great amount of weight. Mum was quite challenging in how she needed to be looked after and it was all down to the dementia really wasn't it? it changed her completely from being a lovely lady she got aggressive so you have to you have to watch what you do with them and you learn you learn every day something different and how to treat someone how to get rounder I knew when she was upset and I could say to a doctor she is now upset because you are now asking her things that's getting on her nerves because her feet used to flap So I would say, you know, she's the art set, but they still carry on. So you were able to pick up those cues because you knew her very, very well, and the people who were trying to help her didn't know her and couldn't engage with hers. No. And they wouldn't ask the silly questions. I mean, one question, do you know who these ladies are? And that was me and my sister. And my mum went, no. I thought, here we go, because I knew she was going to start. And then she said, well, do you know where you are? And she would say, I'm here. Do you know who I am? Yes, you're you. So you knew she was starting to get difficult. She wouldn't engage with those, what they call screening tests for memory, because her personality had become such that... It got on her nerves. It would get on her nerves quite quickly, yeah. Very quickly, she didn't have the tolerance for it. And eventually she was discharged to a care home? No, home. Home, home. Yeah, and we got a 24-hour care at home because she didn't want to go in a care home. And that was her wishes and we wanted to keep her at home. And that's where she wanted to be and that's where she was and we had 24-hour care. As a family, that put a lot of strain on you, I'm sure, because you were there for your mum and you did everything that you possibly could. Yes, yeah. It was very difficult. I mean, I think the worst thing was when she went into hospital she could go to the toilet she could ask and she could go and by the time she came home she was in nappies and I think that is to me I got so angry because I felt that was laziness because she would ask to go but there's no one to take her. Let's talk about that in a separate video because I think that's an interesting point you make.