#(But then I had to walk like 30k steps and just wanted to sleep afterwards instead of finishing it..)

[dailynakaharachuuya]

13. Dog (Wan!) AU

[abybweisse]

LONG VENT POST: Family issues, part 1 of ?

So, a bit ago I said I’m not as active right now, due to family issues. I didn’t want to fill the thread of that post with all the long, sordid details.

Right now I’m trying to get my mother into an “assisted living and memory care” community (nursing home, basically) and doing everything I can to stop her credit union accounts from hemorrhaging from all her incompetence (she’s been scammed a bunch and generally taken advantage of).

Yesterday’s biggest takeaway was the discovery of numerous scams she fell for over the past few years... plus three months worth of fraudulent Uber and Uber Eats charges... and the fact that she pays about $550/mo on car insurance but the last couple times (at least, maybe more) she got collision repairs done? She didn’t file claims and pay a $500 deductible. No, she paid in full, out of pocket. Out $7k instead of $1k for two repairs in just a few months’ time. How can you pay huge insurance premiums and never notify them when you need collision repairs?!

Found out just recently that about a couple years ago, someone scammed her for an easy $5k. Found out she never deposits the full amount on car payments I send her. She never makes full deposits on the rent a tenant pays her. Instead, she cashes much of them out, and I have no idea what she does with the cash.

She buys stuff in bulk but cannot use most of it before it goes bad, but she refuses to toss out expired foods. Her hoarding tendencies have gotten worse. Even though she tells my sister and I not to send her gifts that would add to the clutter in the house, I found out yesterday she’s been dropping $200-$300 on random stuff from places like TJ Maxx and Tuesday Morning just because they made her “happy”. She hasn’t even unpackaged the hanging glass butterflies or other things. I told her she can take them to the “home”....

She’s wrecked two brand new Priuses (about $30k each, each paid up front/in full with inheritance money from my dad, who died five years ago) within about two years’ time. The first was “totaled”, but I have yet to verify whether she ever opened a claim to get money for it. This one hasn’t been officially declared totaled or repairable. I had to file the claim on it on her behalf. For all I know, the $550/mo premium might be on both cars. I’ll know for sure soon. If she’s been paying insurance on a car that was “totaled” two years ago instead of getting market value of about $22k, I will definitely break down and cry. For at least the 50th time in the past few days. Seriously, if she just found out the previous one couldn’t be fixed and walked away from it without filing a claim and getting the huge payout... and is therefore also still paying for insurance on it? I’ll probably scream, too.

The latest (and last ever) car wreck was last Wednesday. We’ve been telling her for over a year she shouldn’t be driving. Her doctors have told her the same for at least 6mo. My sister and I were planning to visit her and take away her keys, but the wreck happened before we could even finalize our travel plans.

This time, she was trying to get to dialysis (she goes three days a week), and she couldn’t use Uber anymore, so she was determined to drive herself. Just before 5 am, she was driving down her own residential street and blacked out (apparently) and hit three parked (and unoccupied) vehicles. Police showed up and she got out of her car and told them she needed a ride to dialysis. One of the officers took her. She can’t recall hitting three cars. Told me she hit a curb and one car. Later told someone else she only hit a curb. I don’t know anything about the curb, but probably. However, I definitely believe the police report that three parked cars were hit badly and had to be towed away, too. After the police spoke to her tenant, they said they’d make things easier for us and revoke her license. Phew.

I convinced dialysis staff (actually, they completely agreed without question) to send her to hospital afterwards instead of letting yet another friend take her home. Good thing, too, because before dialysis was even up that morning, she was in a lot of pain; she had told them earlier she didn’t need to be looked at. Well... no broken bones, no major injuries, and her labs were ok except slightly low potassium. However, a brain scan showed something I already knew just by dealing with her: it showed ischemic changes associated with dementia. Monday of that week, I had called her renal doctor to tell him I worried about her mental health and wondered if it had anything to do with the renal failure. He said he didn’t think so; it’s got to be something else causing the mental decline we are seeing. When I told him she’s still driving sometimes, he became furious and said he’d refer her to get a full dementia evaluation. Well, before he could even get the referral to her, she’d wrecked again. He’s seen her now, but I haven’t heard any updates from him. Mom says she hasn’t done the evaluation (that she knows of), and she heard someone at the hospital mention “dementia”, but she doesn’t recall what they said about it. 😔

I didn’t take photos when I finally saw her car, but I’m going back up to Dallas tomorrow and staying in a Motel 6 overnight (with my dog) to take care of as much financial matters for her as I can in these next two days. I’ll get another chance to see the car (to clean out items), so I’ll take pics then. I might not get back to Austin until sometime Wednesday. Not sure about Wednesday yet, but I already requested Monday and Tuesday off from work by email and left a vm with coworkers. I’m about to run out of annual leave because of this. I know I’ll be making many weekend trips coming up until my sister and I have gotten her moved into the nursing facility. And for a while afterwards, too, since we have to clean out the house, put some of her stuff into a storage unit, and sell the house ASAP. Plus, we need to visit often, at least at first, to make sure she’s settled in, isn’t hating it too much, and is being taken care of properly.

It’s a good thing my sister is paying for my hotel charges and has also offered gas money (though I haven’t asked for gas money... yet). This is still way cheaper for her than booking herself flights back and forth between Olympia, WA and Dallas, TX. The more leg work I do on this, the happier my sister is to help with my travel costs. Honestly, she really doesn’t want to come down here until it’s time to move our mom, clean the house, and put it up for sale.

And, since we have so little time to get her affairs in order, we are placing her in the only community my mom and I have toured, so far. I told her if it turns out to not be a good place (at all) once she moves in, we can keep looking at others (while she still lives at that one) and move her again. But, honestly, this place does seem nice enough, and none of these places are perfect. Plus, it’s right next to the hospital where she always goes... the one where her doctors are associates. I joked that if they needed to send her to the hospital, they could put her on a gurney and wheel her down the street. She laughed at that and said the location is perfect.

Sigh. She’s being compliant and has even said thanks for us (her two daughters) stepping up to help her and get things taken care of. We were afraid she would refuse to leave her house of almost 40years. She’s not even batting an eye at us deciding to sell the house to make sure she can afford the rent and services (the suites at the community are rented out like apartments, but with three meals a day and unlimited snacks, weekly cleaning service, weekly laundry service, landline phone, cable, and internet included. We will have to pay more for “memory care” and probably for medical transport they provide (unless that’s included, too), plus whatever else. She might take her cat with her, or she might leave him with a friend of the family. But it’s a one-time, non-refundable fee of $500 if she keeps him. I kind of hope she gives him up, and they just bring him along on visits to her. She would have trouble taking care of him.

She’s never shown me her finances before. We had no idea how bad (completely uncontrolled) her spending was. It was probably bad enough before our dad died, but afterwards, she started going downhill fast. Now she’s in renal failure and requires dialysis three days a week. She’s recently lost an unhealthy amount of weight in a very short time, apparently because she can’t remember to eat and sometimes she’s too disoriented to get up. She can’t cook anymore, and she’s hardly done cleaning chores since she had kids (that’s what us kids were for: housework). So she’s a money-wasting hoarder in a house full of dirty dishes, dirty clothes, clutter everywhere, and $100’s — maybe $1000 worth — of groceries she can’t get through but won’t throw out when they go bad. And she won’t let anyone else touch them while she’s still living there.

I have so much to do the next couple days, I had to write a list of each thing I need to look into and take care of before I return home. I still have some stuff to get ready for the trip, so this is the end of the first vent post.

I hope I get more sleep tonight than I have the past week....