My mother cognitive disorders after stroke

New to Carers Connect
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Hi, just joined, just this month first time I started joining to this kind of forums.

Since a while that I thought about to find other people with parents with the same of my mother.

The stroke of my mother was more than 10 years ago, so Im not new on this, im not looking for any kind of advices, Im interested in talk with other people with similar experiences.

Ive not live this as a sad thing. Not at all. Its just the way it is. I mean, ive been with this so much time that its just the way it is.

And sometimes is funny, and interesting. Funny because my mother can be extremely funny, due her cognitive imblanace she can come up with hilarious stuff. And its pretty interesting see how her brain works.

She is not “completely lost” at all. Sometimes i read about other people things like they say “how i have to put on my clothes ?” or things like that, or hard things like that.

She have compulsive hoarding, the house is a mess, its hard to tell her “hey, why you dont put that there, and that there, and the house would look better”, its just hard to tell her that, and she gets angry, and its useless. Lately she has been better, but anyway the house is pretty messy,.

She have short memory problems, like “what i was looking for ?? i was going to tell you something but i dont know what”.

She talks a lot. She send weird messages, she wants to ask to someone in facebook “do you still have that you are selling ? how much ? this is my phone” but no, she writes long and strange messages that people should be so confused, using words and ways to construct sentences that are just oddly strange.

She is hard to stay with, i go to visit her, and sometimes is just hard to have a nice visit, she gets angry for little things, and is micromanaging, sometimes I get angry too, lately im trying to let this things pass.

I can talk about her a lot, i can even write a book about her (a good one).

Again, im looking to meet others, i think i should to talk more about her to others identify with her case, but its hard to condence all about her life, and ive been joining to other groups so ive been telling the same story over and over and over and over.

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Hi Diego,
welcome to the forum.

Quite a few people are current or former carers of family members who have had a stroke. I don’t have personal experience of caring for someone following a stroke, though a friend of ours had a mild one a couple of years ago. She is less affected than your Mum, but does have short term memory problems and some physical weakness down one side.

Melly1

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My mum had a number of “mini strokes” in her last year of life, the cumulative effect was so sad. She was an avid reader, but the strokes affected her sight, so no longer able to read. She was the best person you could ever have a conversation with. Housebound for years but watched lots of TV news etc so really well informed. The strokes made her very deaf, I then had to limit the length of my visits as if I raise my voice for long I get a terrible sore throat, an unwanted after affect of an illness some years ago.
Then she forgot the names of flowers I’d picked from her own garden - she used to know all their names and which garden centre she’d bought them from.
Sometimes she would be talking utter gobbledegook, then the next day perfectly lucid.
So sad.

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My lovely husband was in a nursing home because of strokes and vascular dementia. Other illnesses followed. He confabulated such a lot. I went along with what he said, because in his dementia world he truly believed he had been out, etc. He was chair/ bed bound and only had the use of one arm. He also asked about his parents who had died many years ago. I couldn’t tell him that for him to grieve again, then forget so I would say they couldn’t get out today because of the weather, or whatever came into my head. Luckily he always took it. A most difficult part of our long marriage. It was a very long sad goodbye. Sad to see a very able, man with a thirst to learn change so drastically.