In last couple of weeks, MIL ( moderate dementia, living in a care home ) has been calling and leaving many angry nasty messages, asking where is her stuff, where is her money, accusing us stealing from her.
Every day the calls started around 9am, she would call a dozen times. the calls trail off in the afternoon. When DH called her back late afternoon, she would answer the phone and sounded fine, although still was very confused but angry, sometimes even apologetic/embarrassed for leaving angry messages. BTW the care taker says MIL is sleeping fine at night.
It seems that her personality is like Mr. Hyde in the morning, slowly as the day goes on, she turns to Dr. Jekyll late afternoon.
Has anyone seen behaviors like this? So far we just let all the calls go to voice mail and only communicate in the late afternoon.
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Does she actually remember that she was ugly or does your DH remind her? I am surprised that she remembers on her own. But thankfully she is all over it by the time he calls her back.
DH aunt is sometimes resistant to her morning routine and will talk ugly to her caregiver. I asked the caregiver to just walk away and come back in a few minutes. Her caregiver says it works most days.
It sounds like you are handling things just right. Have you ever asked a staff member to check on her when she’s on the calls in the morning? Does she save all her anger for the phone or is she upset with the staff as well? I wonder if she could benefit from a snack of activity during this time to distract her thought process? I would suggest you try removing the phone but releasing it all on VM may actually be therapeutic??
I sometimes think we ask a lot of our loved ones to not be mad. It must be so upsetting for her to get that angry that she would call so many times daily.
Usually with dementia one phase leads to another and you may notice this begin to taper off on its own with no intervention.
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