He is and has been on meds but always gives the docs a difficult time. There are times in the past that i know he has been on meds he didn't need because he lies to the doctor. he does this to get a doctor's "stamp of approval" on his lies.

I don't know exactly what he is taking right now, but I know he has been giving the caretakers difficulty and being non-compliant. Since they are ready to send him home I assume he has been taking them regularly now. The complicated part is that for things like depression there isn't any sort of physical "test" to determine what meds you need, the docs rely on your description of the problem and your description to the reaction of medications. So if he is lying in the first place, and they prescribe something, he may be being "non-compliant" because the depression makes him want to stop (as can happen to any of us) OR he may be non-compliant because he knows he is taking something that he doesn't really need because he lied to the doctor in the first place.

As I said I do believe that he is really suffering from depression now. But I don't believe he is telling the 100% truth about the course that it is taking. If I had to guess I would say the sincere depression is a result of my mom's death two years ago.

As an example of what he does, when I last visited him in the hospital he was very anxious to go home and he was really treading a fine line between letting me know how bad he felt but also that he felt well enough to go home. Although I have very deep (bad) feelings toward him I do NOT want him to suffer, and I know how bad it is in the hospital, and I do want him to feel better and be able to go back home where I know he feels he will be happiest. But that will not happen unless he makes a sincere effort to change his lifestyle with regard to letting people help him clean up the house. He said he would but was giving me the same old "line" he has in the past about wanting to clean it up, that he never follows through on. I pushed him a bit on the issue to let him know he really has to go through with it this time or else the doctors are not going to let him live on his own. Although I cannot physically help him myself I was trying to set up some specific plans to get rid of some of the clutter he is living with. He became very very defensive (to me, a sign that he certainly does NOT really want to clean up the house) and all of a sudden switched the subject to the fact that he also has prostate cancer that he didn't want to tell me before (because he didn't want to worry me). That was supposed to make me feel bad for him and stop arguing with him. The thing is he didn't know I had spoken with his doctor a few days before and the doc specifically mentioned to me that they had tested him for prostate cancer and some other things while he was in the hospital and all the tests were negative because physically he is in fine health!

To me that is the worst kind of manipulative lying. I didn't call him on the lie because at that point I just needed to get out of there for the sake of my own health. It is telling not only that this was a blatant lie, but that he whipped out the lie only at the point when I was clearly not going along with his attempts at pity, and when I expressed my desire to help him make real changes in his life that he is not willing to make.

>>there most be some kind of hatred towards your father or guilt towards yourself for leaving her behind?

Yes there is hatred there, but over the course of many years I do not wish him any harm or ill will, I just want to be left alone and not have any involvement with him. There is some pressure now for me to take over his affairs and I am reluctant to do that, first of all because I don't want to be involved in his life, but also because I don't know that I am in the best state to be making decisions for him. For example I know that what he wants the most is to return home. I do believe he will be happiest there. I also am really concerned about his safety there and his ability to take care of himself in general. If it were me, I would want to be allowed to go home. I know that choosing to place him in a care facility instead would make him very very angry and unhappy. However it may be that that is the best solution for him at this point. That would be a very difficult decision, to make the "tough but right" choice and I don't believe I can be subjective enough in the matter. Right now he has about a billion social workers helping him, they all seem to be sincerely concerned, and I want to leave it to them to know what is really best for him. The best thing I can do is to stay in touch with the social workers and give them as much "insight" into his character as I can so that they know what track they are on.

As for my mom there is not a lot of guilt there mostly because I was so estranged from both of them for so many years. I kind of became "numb" to them for my own sanity. My mom had plenty of support from her family and plenty of opportunity to leave or get help cleaning up the house (I don't think she ever wanted to leave him but she could have been more insistant about cleaning up the house, and had the support of family to help her with that). Instead she ALWAYS chose to defend him whenever anyone was critical. It was always her choice to allow him to live like that rather than do something about it. In many ways I believe she was happy with him but the huge obsticales with regard to their living situation had to take a large toll.

Bottom line is that I always tried to help "fix" the situation with the house and was always rebuffed or lied to by him and she never wanted me to push it further, so I did what I could and then had to care for myself.

I should make it clear that with the colitis I suffer, the stress of the family situation has been literally life threatening for me several times in my life. I was down to a weight of 55 pounds when I was 17 years old, was hospitalized for almost 2 months, and was hospitalized again for long periods several times in the years following. The only thing keeping it under control was very large doses of dangerous medications that I was on for far too long. I was only able to switch to safer "maintenance" meds after leaving home. I still have periods when times are rough but for the most part it has been under control for many years now.

--The world is what we make of it--
-- Dave
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