If your parent has dementia and you are currently taking care of them at home this will get more difficult as time goes by. Sometimes it can be difficult to know when to place someone with dementia in memory care as you want them to stay home with you as long as they can. Below is information to help you decide if you should contact a memory care unit in your area.
Personal Care
Personal care is something that is a problem with everyone that has dementia at some point in the disease. One problem is with toileting and having a lot of accidents. This is the time when you need to purchase adult underwear for them.
You will need to take your parent to the bathroom every few hours as they will not know they need to urinate or defecate. At some point, your parent will not be able to pull their pants up and down so you would have to do this for them. Once they finish using the bathroom they may not know how to wipe, and you will have to do this. If so, you may not be able to get them clean so this could cause an infection to develop.
Showering or bathing is also a common problem. Your parent may fight you so much that you will find it impossible to get them clean properly. This is a big sign that it is time to take them to a memory care facility.
Sleep
Getting enough sleep for you is very important to allow you to properly care for your parent. Sleeping is often a problem, however, as people with dementia have strange sleep schedules. For example, your parent may get up off and on all night long causing you to wake up.
If your parent does get up and you do not hear this, they could become injured. They could trip and fall, and you would not know about it or they could be doing something dangerous, such as getting a knife out of a drawer.
Your parent may get disoriented if they are up walking around at night which will make them scared and likely to yell out. Your parent may also see something that is not there and become very combative with you. Over time this can affect you greatly in all areas of your life so you should consider putting your parent into a memory care facility at this point.
Talk with a few memory care facilities in your area to learn about the services they can offer your parent.
