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My mom was diagnosed with a rare form of dementia called frontotemporal degeneration, that typically does not impact memory but behavior instead.
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In February 2019, my mom was diagnosed with a rare form of dementia called frontotemporal degeneration. Unlike other dementias, frontotemporal dementia typically does not impact memory…well at least not until the end. Like other types of Alzheimer’s disease or dementia, it is a neurodegenerative disease that, as the name suggests, means those with the disease get worse over time.
I’ve gone to the support groups and I’ve talked to professionals (not to mention how lucky I am to have a super supportive husband who’s held my hand — and offered my Kleenexes — through all of this), but I think that maybe writing will offer me the comfort and possibly even the answers I need. So here I am. Here’s how the past four months of my life have gone.
My 37th birthday was yesterday and to say it was memorable is an understatement. In fact, I’m pretty sure that no one else has had a birthday like mine.
It began with a court-appointed processor serving my mom with a citation to appear in court for a petition for guardianship. And, it ended in a police station after mom decided her last screw you before she left Las Vegas would be to charge my husband with vandalism and both of us with restraining orders — and later, me in bed crying just like I’ve done just about every night since January.
You’re probably wondering “Holy moly! What in the world is going on over there?” And, I mean, I’m sitting here at my desk and wondering that myself.
Table of Contents
June 2018
To make a very long story short, my mom and I didn’t have much of a relationship. She had completely violated my trust and my love too many times to count and, for my well being, I knew that a relationship with her wasn’t healthy for me. (I’ll write more about that later.)
When a random Nashville area code popped up on my cell phone in June of last year, I was getting ready to bless out some telemarketer. Instead of being offered an unbeatable deal on a cruise, chills came over me and my stomach fell as the voice on the other end of the line said, “Sarah?”
I hadn’t heard my mom’s voice for almost two years. After years of struggling to right a wrong relationship, I had mourned the loss of my mom while she was still alive. So hearing her on the other end of the line was like hearing someone from beyond the grave.
Over the next few months, mom would come in and out of contact, go missing for a few weeks and then pop back into existence like nothing happened. On July 14th, after one of mom’s disappearances, my sister called the local police department for a welfare check. In September, she started talking about her phone getting hacked and changed her number. That would mark the second new number since June, and eventually increase to five new numbers before December.
Hacking & Break Ins
Mom said that her ex-boyfriend, Lonnie, was hacking into her cell phone, reading her email, intercepting her mail, and stealing her digital pictures to watermark them and sell them to National Geographic. (Lonnie is a man in his mid-70s who uses a flip phone and has no apparent technological knowledge or skill — certainly not an NSA-level hacker.) She said that he would break into her home every night to move things around or take things and later bring them back.
Mom said that she had been in touch with the police (no report on file) who told her to call the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, who never returned her call. She asked me to look up the contact information for Mark Zuckerberg, the creator and CEO of Facebook, and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, because she felt that they would be willing and able to help her with her problems.
I told her that we would be driving through Nashville on the way to my husband’s home town for Christmas and that I would love to see her. We hadn’t spent one Christmas together since my parents’ separation in 2012 and subsequent divorce two years later. It wasn’t because I didn’t try either; I invited her to Drew’s family’s Christmas celebration two years in a row, and she called both times on Christmas morning to say should wasn’t feeling well enough to attend. I stopped asking when I found out later that she celebrated Christmas at a friend’s house both years.
She asked me to look up the contact information for Mark Zuckerberg, the creator and CEO of Facebook, and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, because she felt that they would be willing and able to help her with being hacked.
December 2018
Since August, I had been talking with my mom’s sister, Ann. She was so happy that mom and I were working on our relationship (as much as we could) and that I was helping her out. We cried over my parents’ divorce, the family breaking up, and mom’s struggles – real and imagined. I confided in her that I just didn’t feel that mom loved me enough to have a relationship with me; that mom always put herself first, and it just took me growing up to realize it. I was so happy to have someone who’s known me my whole life to confide in.
Ann relied on me to do all the heavy lifting, from repeated calls to mom to calling the police to check on her.
“Have you talked to your mama?” “Did you call the police?” “What’s wrong with your mama?”
A Disappearing Act
When mom did another one of her disappearing acts at the beginning of December, I asked her if she wouldn’t mind checking on her. She pushed it off onto me even though she lives a mere few hours away and I live on the other side of the country. She would rather have waited a whole month for someone to check on her than drive 200 miles.
But honestly, I wasn’t too worried about mom. She’d disappeared before and I kind of figured she was just going to flake out on me again for Christmas. Drew and I headed to Sweden and I figured she would have called and left a message while we were gone. When we got back to the States on the 17th and there was no message from her, I got concerned.
I called the police department and asked them to do another welfare check; no one answered the door. I called back the next day and they went over again. This time they were able to get her to come to the door. She said everything was fine but that she had to cut off her phone because her ex was stalking her and could track her via her cell phone number. She told the police to call me and tell me that she was still on for Christmas and that she was looking forward to seeing me in a few days.
When the police officer called me back to let me know she was alive (and to relay her message), he asked me if my mom was mentally stable, if she had known drug use, or was suicidal. He said she was obviously not doing okay and that I should get to Nashville as soon as I could.
Four days later, I got a call from a Target in Nashville. Without access to a phone, mom thought she’d roll up on a Target customer service desk and use theirs. She stood there and talked to me from the Target for 30 minutes.
The police officer asked me if my mom was mentally stable, if she had known drug use, or was suicidal. He said she was obviously not doing okay and that I should get to Nashville as soon as I could.
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December 24, 2018
Drew and I drove straight through from Las Vegas to Nashville, literally sleeping in the car instead of stopping, so that we could get to mom’s house to check on her and then make it to his hometown on Christmas Eve night.
I wanted to surprise mom (not that I could have told her I was coming anyway) to catch her in her normal environment, without the facade that she has always been so adept at orchestrating. After pounding on the door for a few minutes, I heard rustling inside as mom came to the door. I could hear furniture sliding on the hardwood floors, removing the barricade from the door. The door unlocked and then cracked open.
It was afternoon and she was still in her pajamas. She smelled sickly sweet, soured. Her teeth hadn’t been brushed for days and her hair was grey and long down her back. The circles under her eyes were dark and angry. She was slurring her speech. “What day is it? Has Christmas already happened?” she asked me.
I cried. Standing in the foyer of the home where I grew up; the foyer where prom pictures were taken, friends came to work on school projects, or pick me up as we drove off to choir practice, I let out tears that had been years in the making.
Christmas
After telling mom to count three sunsets and then I’d be back, Drew and I drove away as I fought back the urge to stay. I cried all the way to East Tennessee. Some of you might judge me and say, “How could you leave your mom like that? I would have stayed.” And I get that. But I was scared, shocked, and honestly still hurt from the years of rejection.
As we drove down the road, I called my aunt to tell her what all I had seen, how she looked, the furniture barricade, the notes taped all over the walls. Until that moment, we’d been able to blame mom’s odd behavior on her lifelong commitment to marching to the beat of her own drum. But we finally realized that something was really wrong with her.
Over the next few days, Drew and I toiled over plans on how to get mom back home to Las Vegas. I couldn’t stay in Nashville because my life and work is in Las Vegas. Luckily, Vegas is also home to the Cleveland Clinic for Brain Health and I knew, if I could just get her there, we could figure out what was going on and get her the help she needed. I talked over the plans with Ann and she agreed that would be the best thing.
It killed me leaving mom like I did and not being able to talk to her and Christmas was especially hard. I kept thinking about her in her house, wandering around alone. I was minorly comforted by the fact that I didn’t think she knew what day it was. We got back to mom’s house after three sunsets, just like I said, and she thought we’d been gone a week, that we’d gone back to Las Vegas without visiting. She was still in the same pajamas.
Here’s a small list of what I found while we stayed with mom for four days:
- The house I grew up in has four bedrooms and bathrooms. Three of the rooms were so hoarded that they were virtually inaccessible and only one bathroom was functional and/or accessible. The tub in the accessible bathroom did not drain properly, so she was relegated to taking occasional sponge baths from the sink. Mom slept in one of the hoarded up rooms, in a bed surrounded by a sea of boxes and trash.
- One night, we took her to dinner and afterward stopped by Target. I noticed that her purse seemed oddly heavy and joked with her about what she was carrying around. She whipped out a loaded .45 in the middle of the store.
- She said she wasn’t sleeping very well because Lonnie broke in on her just about every night. She said she could hear him going through her things but she was too scared to even move. One night, she said she got courageous after seeing a man walk down the hallway in the dark. She got out her loaded .45 and shot the gun inside the home. The bullet entered the hall closet and went into the backside of the master bedroom closet. She’d filled in the hole that was left behind with toothpaste.
- We took her to a Nashville Predators game and she loaded her car with “all of her valuables” so that Lonnie couldn’t steal them when he broke in. We tried to assure her that he wouldn’t break in because our two big dogs were hanging out at the house. Mom told us to whisper because, since Lonnie had bugged the house, she didn’t want him to know her plans. She was inconsolable when we returned home because, even though there was no sign of entry, the barricade that she had put up was untouched (including the tin foil on the floor), and the dogs were happily asleep upstairs, she was convinced that he’d broken in to move a lamp from the console table to the floor.
- We did a little research online and found out that, in September, Lonnie had purchased a home and moved to a town in Alabama that’s about three hours round trip to my mom’s house. So daily break-ins weren’t possible.
- I found a CVS prescription record from 2017 that included 147 filled prescriptions, many of which were for opioids. I’ve since learned that this is called polypharmacy.
- Her car tag was three years out of date.
- She said she had been suicidal.
With each finding, I called or texted Ann. We were both in shock but so glad that mom was going to hopefully get help now. Here are screenshots of our text messages proving that I told her what I was doing the whole time. Nothing, not one single bit of the plan to get mom to the doctor in Las Vegas, should have been a surprise.
Back in Las Vegas
I told my mom that I didn’t think it was safe or healthy for her to be in her home alone with Lonnie breaking in all the time (wink wink). I said she needed a vacation and some good desert weather and maybe she should consider coming back with us for a little bit.
To my surprise, she agreed and started packing. A couple of days later, Drew packed up our Jeep with our two dogs and I drove mom in her car. For the majority of the trip, I listened to podcasts while mom slept deeply from the passenger side. She’d wake up every now and then to point out something she saw or say she needed to go to the bathroom, and then fall right back asleep.
There were a lot of bizarre things that mom did during our journey but her grabbing the steering wheel while we were driving through a snowstorm in New Mexico causing me to run into a snowbank on the interstate, not remembering how to pump gas, and fully unpacking every night were some of the most memorable.
I got mom all settled into our guest bedroom when we arrived in Vegas. The next morning, I called the Alzheimer’s Association to get some help, they referred me to Las Vegas Neurology Center as the first step to getting mom into the Cleveland Clinic.
Seeing the Doctors
I scheduled mom’s appointment for about a week later. I told her that she should go see a doctor since she hadn’t been in a while (she wouldn’t leave the house because of Lonnie). The Alzheimer’s Association suggested that I write up some of my concerns and observations and give it to the doctor privately before the appointment as well as hide all the knives in my house.
Getting A diagnosis: Frontotemporal dementia
The neurologist scheduled mom for a four-hour neuropsychological exam and an MRI and ordered every blood test possible. Mom was loving the attention and happy to go along to the appointments. Following the neuropsych exam, mom really liked the neuro-psychologist and thought she was sweet and caring.
About a week after the psych assessment, mom had her follow up with the neurologist to go over the blood work and the MRI. Her blood work came back great. The MRI, on the other hand, was concerning.
She showed us mom’s MRI and noted areas of atrophy in the frontal lobe of her brain. She concluded that mom had something called bvFTD, or behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia, a neurodegenerative disease that causes shrinkage of the frontal lobe. She discussed with us how shrinkage of the brain is normal with aging, but the amount that mom had was more consistent with a neurodegenerative disease.
I’m not sure that we really let that diagnosis sink in, to be honest. Then about a week later we had the follow-up meeting with the neuropsychologist who mom had initially loved so much.
She diagnosed mom independently with the same disease, bvFTD. She sat with us for almost two hours discussing the findings from her evaluation and tests. Mom, she said, had severe deficiencies in executive functioning, delayed recall, and memory recognition; however, her memory, attention, and language skills were average.
The Worst part of FTD
I think that’s one of the most insidious things about this disease, that someone can just become a different person, lose empathy and the ability to make decisions but seem completely normal to all of those looking in from the outside. All of the years of wondering what happened to my mom, my best friend, now it was all starting to make sense. And the more I read about frontotemporal dementia, the more I realized that mom has almost every single one of the symptoms (see the symptoms down below), from standing too close to people, to hoarding, to an inability to handle finances and prioritize activities, to eating only one thing — like packets of oatmeal, Skittles, or cream horns — for days at a time.
After the visit with the neuropsychologist mom’s switch flipped on the doctor.
Originally, this doctor was wonderful, caring and empathetic. Now she was cold, calculated, and perhaps best of all, mom said that she was trying to make sexual advances towards Drew. I found out later that she called Las Vegas Neurology Center and threatened to sue them for HIPPA violations even though she never expressed to anyone that she didn’t want me to go back with her. When I asked her why she just didn’t tell me she didn’t want me to go back, she said that I bullied her and made her feel as though she couldn’t speak her mind. That’s when she started lying about me.
Diagnosing bvFTD is complicated because the symptoms are often misdiagnosed as another form of dementia, a psychiatric illness, or simply depression — or even a midlife crisis. It is characteristically an early onset dementia, with patients typically being diagnosed in their 30s – 60s.
Here are the symptoms of bvFTD from the Association of Frontotemporal Dementia:
The Aftermath
You might be asking “How did we get to the police station in Las Vegas on your birthday?” Well, the chaos started after a recommendation from the neuropsychologist. In her evaluation and in speaking with me, she recommended that mom not take on the responsibility of driving.
“Minimize activities in which simple errors could have devastating consequences like driving, stovetop cooking, and handling of major financial activities.”
By this time, mom had moved into a really cute two bed/two bath upscale Airbnb close to our house. For Christmas, we’d bought Drew’s mom a flight to come see us not knowing all this with my mom was going to happen. Since we only have one guest bedroom, and since mom had already stayed with us for a month, we thought she might like some space of her own.
Drew and I talked to mom about the doctor’s recommendation that she not drive and said we understood how tough this was, but that it was just until we could see a doctor at the Cleveland Clinic. She was very cool about it…very calm. And in all honesty, in the month and a half that she’d been with us, she’d only driven once. One. Time. And she didn’t come home until after 11 pm because she got lost for several hours.
Meltdown
An epic meltdown, like one I’ve never witnessed, happened later when we actually were taking the keys. I can’t say I’m very clear on how we got here, but mom questioned how many sexual partners I’d had, then said I was lying when I told her the answer. She said that I’d called her a whore, which NEVER, EVER happened. And then said that I’d orchestrated this whole diagnosis with the doctors in order to kill her, take her money and give it to my dad.
Barefoot, she walked out the door of her Airbnb into the cold night and said she was going to WalMart – that we couldn’t do this to her, that she had rights. She didn’t walk to Walmart as you might imagine, but when she came back inside she was so furious that she attempted to open a wine bottle with a corkscrew, but it was just a twist top.
Yelling at Drew when he tried to help, she said “Don’t come near me!! I know how to open an f’ing wine bottle!!!” When Drew got it open for her, she tipped it back and drank it straight from the bottle.
From that night on, she retreated into herself.
I’d always understood that mom inevitably saw herself as the hero in her own soap opera. She was the main character, everyone else was there to make her look good, or be her villain. Now Drew and I joined an esteemed group of people who served as my mom’s adversaries: my dad, her former attorneys, her ex-boyfriend, and all those others throughout her life she believed had gotten in her way.
Lack of Support
One of the hardest things that I’ve had to deal with throughout this whole experience is the lack of support that I’ve received from my family. My mom has lied to them all about her conditions. I’ve heard from them that I keep her in a basement, that I only feed her canned food, that I left her in her Airbnb for weeks on end without talking to her or visiting her, that Drew and I are emotionally and verbally abusive to her, and her favorite — that we have ulterior motives.
The lies are so bad that when my mom fell from an electric scooter while we were in San Diego one weekend, I made sure to record her saying that she fell because I knew she’d say I hit her.
Ann, my mom’s sister, who not only encouraged me to come all the way to Nashville to take her to the doctor, but also couldn’t drive three hours to see about mom herself, told me that mom was fine and that I needed to take her home. Susan, my other aunt, listened to the conditions that I found mom in and heard about the diagnosis from the doctors and told me that mom needed to be able to make up her own mind as to where she lived. What they fail to understand is mom, as they knew her, isn’t really in there anymore. She absolutely can’t make sound decisions about her life.
So my aunts, the very ones who said there’s something wrong with her, go see about her — now demanded that I deliver my mom back to the home where she was living with rat feces, holes in the walls, no working shower, and where she has access to guns – that she shoots in the home, and where she feels as though she gets stalked every night.
They actually stopped talking to me. My 60-70-year-old aunts gave me the silent treatment for caring for my mom in the way that I was instructed by the doctors. Because my mom repeatedly lied to them about her living conditions and her diagnosis.
No Desire to do Anything
During these weeks and months, I tried to get mom to hang out with me every single day. Except for a 10-day trip that we had booked to Armenia a year ago, I called her three times every day to ask her to come out with me to run errands or just go for a walk. Even when we were in Armenia I called her twice a day. I bought her $200 worth of groceries before we left (she refused to come to the door to get them so I laid them on the porch) and asked a friend in my neighborhood, who’s mom’s age, to take her out a few times for lunch or coffee while we were gone. Mom vehemently rejected the visits.
Even when she moved back in with us, she kept the door closed and the window curtains drawn. No lights on. She’d wake up around noon, and then sit in bed wearing her pajamas all day and all night staring at her computer and complaining about hackers. The only way I could get her to emerge was if I made dinner and told her that she had to come and sit down with us.
I asked her if she wanted to come to the gym with me, do a yoga class, go to TJ Maxx (her only real hobby besides pecking around on her laptop and trying to email Mark Zuckerberg), walk around the neighborhood, anything….the answer was always maybe and then later “I’m not feeling so well.” Then she’d usually launch into the myriad ways in which Lonnie was still hacking into her computer here (even though she has a new cell phone (a flip phone so there’s no data to hack), a new computer, several new email addresses and Facebook accounts) and ask for my help with whatever technological woes she had invented that day.
One weekend in April, I asked her if she wanted to come to the Japanese Spring Festival with us and grab lunch. She said her allergies were too bad to be outside. We found out later that she sunbathed outside for four hours. When one of our dogs pooped near where she was laying out, she pushed dozens of little quartz landscape rocks into the poop in an attempt to hide it. Finally, I begged her to come with us to Easter brunch and she said she didn’t want to get up that early (10 am).
While my mom tells her sisters that we abused her by keeping her locked in a basement and fed her canned food and never invited her out, we were able to get her out to do the following things:
- Concerts & Shows
- Penn & Teller (mom got pulled up on stage with Penn!)
- Human Nature
- Big Elvis (an Elvis impersonator)
- Carrot Top
- WOW (an aerial aquatic show)
- Travel
- Three Days in San Diego – Hotels, meals, trolley tour, La Jolla sea lions, and a photography tour of the waterfront
- Nashville Predators at Vegas Golden Knights NHL game
- Nashville Predators vs New York Rangers
- The Linq – High Roller
- Shopping excursions
- Grocery shopping (although many times she just gave me a list and had me run her errands for her) – many times paid by me
- Visiting Bonnie Springs Ranch with brunch
- Countless doctor’s appointments including neurologists, pain clinic appointments, physical therapy, MRI and bloodwork, CT scan of her shoulder, and walk-in clinics. Not to mention the appointments I made for her that she refused to go to (gynecologist, internist, & dentist)
- Hanging out at the house watching TV, playing board games, enjoying the hot tub, and getting a manicure
Just months before, she was living in a rat feces-infested hoard without a working shower or bathtub, rarely leaving her house, and eating packets of oatmeal or stale pastries — when she ate at all.
Even though she only rarely left her room while she lived with us, she did more things than she’d done in the previous decade. She also ate better, slept well, and bathed regularly.
Flash Forward
There’s a lot more to tell, but I want to get to recent developments. The first available appointment I was able to get at the Cleveland Clinic was April 24. During that waiting period, I found a dementia support group for caregivers and I met some wonderful people. It was such a relief to talk to people who were suffering in the same ways Drew and I were (misery loves company, right?!).
They encouraged us to talk to an elder law attorney to get things in order since mom refused to let me know anything about her medical information, didn’t take her medication as prescribed, lied about outcomes of doctors’ meetings — not to mention the extreme financial distress she is in.
At the end of March, we moved mom out of her Airbnb and back into our house. We found out then that she’d had her car rekeyed. I didn’t want to go through taking away her keys again, so we let her have them. She paid $500+ to have her vehicle rekeyed and she drove it once…to our house after she moved out of her Airbnb.
So Close to the Cleveland Clinic
She was absolutely wild in the week leading up the appointment with Cleveland Clinic and refused to go. She didn’t want to know if she had bvFTD (even though she’d been diagnosed twice) and she was going to drive home. Her behavior was erratic and angry. Her cycle was about four days; for three days she would thank you for caring for her and then you’d wake up on day four and be her mortal enemy…with ulterior motives.
I was able to convince her to go to her appointment and she wanted me to drive her – because I think deep down she knew she shouldn’t be driving. I overheard her talking to the nurse while she was checking out — “And Sarah Johnson IS NOT to know anything regarding my medical information. She becomes too emotional and she can’t be trusted.” I asked her how the appointment went and she said the doctor doubted that she had FTD and that her symptoms were probably due to stress and PTSD.”
The doctor ordered a PET scan for the following day (this past Thursday) which she, again, wanted me to drive her to. After that, she became very aggressive and argumentative. On Thursday night we invited her to dinner, she declined. On Friday afternoon, we invited her to lunch, she declined. Saturday, she spent the day washing her clothes and sheets and vacuuming the carpet in her bedroom. I asked her if she was planning on leaving. I said, “You wouldn’t leave without telling me, would you?” She assured me that she wouldn’t.
On Sunday, I did a workout at my gym and when I came home she was in the worst mood. She knows how to push any hot button you might have and she pokes and pokes at it until you get into a huge fight. Well, that’s how Sunday went. Except this time, she loaded her car and, tires screaming, drove away from the house.
On the Run
Drew followed her to Henderson — a Vegas suburb about half an hour from our house. He filmed her turning off the interstate into oncoming traffic, cars honking; jumping the median; then jumping back over it to do a U-turn. He filmed her going 40 MPH on the interstate while cars honked as they drove past her, as well as weaving into other lanes of traffic. But, you know, as long as her sisters say she’s fine to drive…
That night, we didn’t know what to do. We knew she was unsafe driving, but we couldn’t get any help from her doctors or law enforcement. I filed a missing person report and Drew drove to her hotel and … let the air out of one tire. It wasn’t a smart move. I admit it.
But we were desperate. The police called us and said they’d found mom (since she was a missing person and all) but that someone was trying to do her harm because her tire was flat. We told him the story, and to his credit, was the only one at this point who’d really helped us out. He told us that he understood what we were going through, that (obviously) we shouldn’t have done that, that there are better ways to immobilize someone (he told us that we should have let the air out of all four of her tires), and that we needed to get down there and fill her tire back up, which we did.
April 29, 2019
On Monday, my support group suggested that now was the time to pull the trigger on the filing for emergency temporary guardianship. My attorney got everything finalized and submitted to the court and we went to her hotel to talk to her, to try to get her to stay. She wouldn’t even talk to me but instead went to the front desk and told them to call the police.
April 30, 2019
On Tuesday, my 37th birthday, my mom was served with papers from the court. Later that afternoon, I got a call from the Henderson police department. They said that mom was at their station and that she had all kinds of allegations against me and my husband. The officer said that my mom tried to file a restraining order against us and that she tried to file a report on him for vandalism. He asked me if my mom was on any antipsychotics. I said she’s supposed to be. He told me to come down to the station and take possession of her.
As you can imagine, she pitched an absolute fit. She didn’t want to go with me. She said that I abused her, kept her locked up in a room, I didn’t feed her, I made her stay in an Airbnb in a terrible area of Las Vegas (it was on Edna Avenue by The Lakes and Canyon Gate County Club). The officer told her that she didn’t need to go with me but she couldn’t drive that night so they made her stay in town one more night.
Now she’s off. She’s driving through Arizona (good luck Grand Canyon State!). And guess what finally came through yesterday? The doctor’s note that suspended her driver’s license until she passed a driving test. It came about three hours too late to keep her safely in the state.
Finally, Ann texted me to tell me that she knew what I’d done…that I’d served mom with guardianship papers. Like I was going to or could hide it from her? And my half-sister Kris, who mom has been able to snow and thinks that mom is totally fine because she (I’m not joking) successfully put a Stouffer’s lasagne into the oven in November, won’t respond to any of my text messages or calls.
What the serious hell is going on with my life?
How is it possible that three world-class neurologists can diagnose my mom with a neurodegenerative disease which causes her to lie, manipulate, be aggressive, hoard, make terrible financial decisions (all of these things my mom does) and my family thinks I am trying to do her harm?
I got my mom out of her suicidal state, away from her guns, and out of her unsafe home, put her in a safe, loving environment, and finally got her the medical help she so desperately needed. And for that, I lost my entire family — and may well lose my mother forever, unless she is arrested or miraculously makes it back to Nashville before she wrecks.
Update
Before I could even get my post up, I have an update. My mom’s sister, Susan, who she hasn’t talked to in years (except for meeting her for about an hour on her 70th birthday), texted me along with Ann and two other numbers I don’t know. She said that they had retained mom an attorney and that they had turned me into the Nevada Elder Abuse Agency. So I guess I’ll be getting another visit from the police any time now. (Update: No visit or filing with Protective Services took place.)
I can’t wait to tell them about where she was living, how she was living, her failure to thrive, the five guns that she has at her home and how she carries them around and shoots them inside her home at ghosts, the supposed stalkers and hackers that haunt her 24-hours a day, the sleepless nights spent in fear, and then the beautiful homes she lived in while she was here, the meals I made for her (with no thanks or contribution), the groceries I bought for her, the world-class healthcare she’s received, the trips I’ve taken her on, and the shows she’s been to.
Never once was I or my husband abusive to my mom. She had been alone for months, not speaking to a soul, not venturing out of her house not once, when I scooped her up to take her to get medical care in Nevada. I was the only one who volunteered. Everyone else who cares now…where were you then? Where were you when you told me to drive across the country to check on her because you couldn’t be bothered to drive from Alabama to Tennessee?
I look forward to you spending time with mom, more than the 10-minutes you devote to her on the phone a few times a week. I also look forward to your attorney learning what the doctors have found and what mom has lied about.
About Sarah
Sarah hails from the land of fried chicken, sweet tea, buttered biscuits, and the friendliest people you’ll ever meet…Alabama! She loves exploring undertouristed locations and sharing them with you.
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2 Comments
Tricia Snow
Posted at 21:54h, 21 OctoberWhat a terrible disease! I am so sorry you are going through this. Hopefully there will be healing in your family some day. You need to rest in the fact that you are doing everything you can to help her.
Sarah
Posted at 09:32h, 29 OctoberThank you so much, Tricia. I really appreciate you reaching out. I can’t help but feel like there’s always something more that I could have done, or actions that I could have taken differently. But I guess that’s what’s so frustrating about hindsight. Thank you again.
-Sarah