I was talking to our mother’s doctor last week.
Her dementia is hastily getting worse, and I worry about her all the time.
I’m getting to where I’m not sure what to do. Dad is constantly cold, so I put a space heating system in her room. The space heating system has a lot of safety features and the tag said it was safe around children. There is a tip over feature where the space heating system will turn off if it is jostled or pushed over. The only feature I don’t love about the space heating system is that when the space heating system is unjammed, it resets. The reset isn’t love normal resets. The control component resets to 98 degrees if I don’t watch closely and Dad unplugs the space heater. It can get mighty moderate in her room in a short amount of time. She was getting to where she wasn’t able to make nice decisions and could do irreparable harm to herself and to the family if the curtains would catch fire. I thought about how she had pushed the heating system under the windows and the curtains were covering the vents where the heat came out. If the temperature was still at ninety-eight, there was no way both of us could have saved her if a fire started. We had to get rid of the space heating system and put an electric heat strip at the top of the wall and connected it to the electric system. She is now safe from the heating system, but both of us are now fitting all the doors with safety locks so she doesn’t walk out in the middle of the evening.