At one point, my (adoptive) childlike, narcissistic father became so difficult, that I decided to take matters into my own hands and find a geriatric specialist. We needed help.
The question? Should I allow Adad to continue living in his own home as he insisted, despite the ominous warning signs of a failing memory, repeated falls, a dirty house and near empty refrigerator? Adad refused even part-time help of a housekeeper or someone to check up on him. (I live 400 miles away). The neighbors were getting pretty fed up. He kept calling them for help, the very same people he'd treated with disdain.
I flew in for the appointment with the geriatric specialist.
I was running a bit late, maybe five minutes. As I ran up the stairs, I could hear my father practically shouting. He was explaining, at top volume, that he was miserable and his bladder was out of control and he needed to be seen immediately. It didn't matter that there was a waiting room full of people. I saw people recoil. They held their magazines up close to their faces or acted engrossed in their children, hoping to avoid him. Adad had the look of a man casting about for a sympathetic ear. When he saw me, he didn't ask how my early morning flight was or if I had time to eat, he immediately launched into his own tale of woe.
After the appointment, I was to meet with the geriatric specialist only once.
His advice?
Find an assisted living facility for Adad. Immediately. He was no longer able to live alone safely. He was showing signs of Lewy Body dementia, a disease that affects the frontal lobes (and impairs judgment). He strongly advised me not to attempt to hire caretakers. A single caretaker, he warned me, wouldn't last a day with my father. Adad was a lethal combination of neediness and rudeness, he observed, and I'd spend all my time replacing caretakers.
"People like him," said the doctor grimly, "are at much greater risk for elder abuse. Better spread around the joy, if you get what I mean. People who work at an assisted living facility or nursing home are trained to deal with difficult personalities and it won't be just one person caring for him, it will be many, so he won't burn them out as fast."
The doctor then went on to express his concern (annoyance) that my father hadn't answered any of his questions because he talked nonstop. "Was he always like this?" he asked.
"All his life," I said.
"So that's not the dementia? He always goes on and on like that? It's like he wasn't hearing me at all."
"Yes," I said. "I'm 43 and I've never finished a single sentence in my life."
He shook his head. In wonder or disgust I'm not too sure.
I was filled with joy. This was my first outside confirmation that Adad was not just a difficult person, but a nearly impossible one. I wasn't crazy! I wasn't selfish! I wasn't to blame for not loving this man who had adopted me! The doctor, a geriatric specialist, clearly loathed my father after a twenty minute appointment! The dislike was right there on his face to see. What he did not understand was that Adad was and is a childlike, narcissist.
Not even this geriatric specialist would put up with Adad. He dropped him as a patient.
Luckily, Adad has become less offensive as his dementia has progressed, but I've noticed the new doctor spends the bare minimum of time with him. Finding good care for the aging narcissist is a real challenge.
10 comments:
This doctor sounds almost like an "enlightened witness"... ? It's just unbelievable how even one single word from a witness can change everything.
Adventurous Snob? Are you the same as Anonymous Bob? ANYWAY, Yes! I hadn't thought of the doctor in quite this way, although that's EXACTLY what he was. The witness that Alice Miller talked about in her book(s). Funny. It hadn't occurred to me. You're right...simple validation from a single source does have the power to change everything!
Yes sorry Nina it's Anonymous Bob, just wanted to try something new. :P
Your dad sounds like an impossible man. Often times we do what's right just because it's right, not because we love or even like our parents. It is the most difficult thing I have ever done!
Glad you got some validation from this doctor, Nina
Anonymous,
There is some personal satisfaction of doing the right thing, but rising above the ugly past can be extremely difficult and exhausting. It's like running a marathon without nourishment or water.
THANKS, ANNIE!
"You're right...simple validation from a single source does have the power to change everything!"
Yes! Because when somebody validates the truth about our situation, about our parents or our history, a truth we may have felt but a truth that we couldn't understand or admit intellectually because we were busy trying to adapt and conform to survive there will be a release of the tension between our feelings and thoughts because finally our intellectual understanding and our feelings are at least a step closer to being in sync!
I'm starting to think that this may be the most important thing in healing from having narcissistic parents. Maybe we can't change our parents but we can finally find the truth about how things were - we can have our experiences and our feelings validated.
Hey Nina,
Great post.
My mom has been hospitalized over the past few days for an emergency hysterectomy (likely uterine cancer). Now my brother Jon is running around with like a chicken with his head cut off (he's the only one of us three siblings who is still in touch with her).
She can't go back to the hotel -- at least, not right away. She has to go to rehab. We have a few in mind. We will see if she behaves enough to even last a fraction of the necessary time span for a 77-year-old who just had major abdominal surgery...
(Of course, if only she'd bothered to even get basic OB/GYN care over the past decades, such as even a regular pap smear ever now and again, all of this might have been averted, or at least much less emergent).
If only.
Elise
ELISE!!!
Well, I imagine that after recovery from the surgery there will be more tests to determine whether - if cancer - it has spread? Even though your brother is dealing with it, I'm sure he is calling you for support and just following what's going on is probably very stressful. Maybe you are even battling Damned Guilt, dunno. Surgery in people that age is pretty risky.
Sending positive thought rays in your direction!!!
Well, she'll need followup once she's out of the rehab. But rather than moving into one of the assisted living facilities we've been checking out (we're talking champagne-level kinds of places, here), she wants to move back to the hotel.
Even my brother Jon has started to refer to her as "that woman"...i.e., "I have no idea why I'm still wasting time trying to help that woman".
She wants to be accountable to no one, as usual. So I guess she'll go back to the hotel, where people are paid to be nice to her, rather than to assisted living, where they're paid (and trained) to know what's *good* for her, and to act on it.
She'll keep going on this way, of course, until she ends up in the one exact place she always said she never wanted to go --- a nursing home.
I am steering well clear, other than helping my brother by taking his I-need-to-vent phone calls, and to help him research the facilities she ends up never allowing herself to consider.
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