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