Dod I do anything wrong? Sick dad told my husband that he no longer wants to talk to

My dad has prostrate cancer & is going through chemotherapy now. He recently moved into an assisted living facility. I wasn’t told where he would move to.

Anyways, for context, I’ll include everything from the start. He’d answer the phone almost every time I called him.

We were never close to each other. He is a narcissist & mentally & emotionally abusive too.

He never respected me or my boundaries, so I kept my distance from him for years. Despite all of that, I was upset to hear that my mom & my sister left him in a filthy house for a week and a half.

There was human feces on the floor as well as blood from him. He uses a walker. He has a hard time getting up too. I wasn’t there. My husband saw how disgusting the house was when he we t there on a business trip.

My mom & my sister moved out with my sisters latest boyfriend. My mom eventually returned to the house. They had a big fight.

They didn’t even call him or check up on him. No one did. Only a social worker stopped by.

I don’t understand why he didn’t move out sooner. Maybe he didn’t want to be away from my mom & my sister?

Anyways, I didn’t hear from him for over a week. So I got worried & called the local police to do a wellness check.

My sister & my mom blocked my number years ago. They are both very self absorbed & abusive to me too

My mom has always favored my sister & she probably blocked me on my moms phone

She has a paranoid delusional disorder. She stopped talking to me after I yelled at her for bring a bad mother & how she never loved me as she does everything for my sister & nothing for me. All she ever did was put me down & criticize me.

Her ego couldn’t handle the truth so she ignored me instead if apologizing to me.

So I couldn’t call them or any relatives. I did call my uncle who lives in the same town, but he is mean & he didn’t really want to talk to me much.

That’s my moms brother. So the officer told me where he’s staying as my mom told him that information.

I then called the facility & they couldn’t give me any information due to HIPPA laws. They couldn’t even tell me if he was there .

Tbe lady who answered the phone was rude She hung up on me. Before she did, she said that I need permission from whoever has power of attorney. I thi my sister had power of attorney.

No one tells me anything, so idk. So I told her that no one has told me anything & that since my mom & my sister blocked me, I can’t find put who has power of attorney.

I called the manager & complained about her but I doubt that anything was done.

So my dad called my husband the other day & told him that I was bothering gim & that he was mad that I did a wellness check & mad that I even mentioned my sisters name.

They are both extremely protective of her despite her being a career criminal & a user loser who has lived at home on & off since she was 18 years old She is now 47 years old.

She hooks up with guys, then the relationship ends in a year or two as she’s bipolar & unmedicated. Then she ends up moving back home again.

She is abusive & violent too as she assaulted me & an ex boyfriend in the past

She is very good at manipulating my parents. She might be influencing them & committing elder abuse too.

So even though we have no real relationship, it does hurt to ne cut off just for showing concern.

What’s worse is that my jerk husband thinks that I shouldn’t have conducted the wellness check or called the facility.

He told me that I should’ve talked to him first. He said that the people at the facility think that you’re cuckoo now, ugh.

He was so nasty & he told me it’s my fault that my nasty mom & sister blocked me.

I told him to call my dad & explain to him that I was worried about him What if he fell or died?

Did I do anything wrong? What would you have do e if you were me?

Right now I just give up on him. I moztly have given up on him, but I won’t bothet calling him anymore as be is to weird, secretive, abusive & frustrating to deal with as well as nasty & rude.

I feel like I never had a real family which makes me upset, angry, depressed, unloved, broken & lonely too.

Hi @jesyka - I am sorry that your dad did not accept your invitation to mend the fences so to speak and smooth things over. You made a good effort.

How are things going with your husband? Do you have any kids?

CANDC

[If you want me to see your reply to this post please include @CANDC in your message - not in requoting my message]

@CANDC, thanks. My dad has always been a mean & emotionally abusive narcissist. I’m done trying to get along with him anymore. He favors my nasty user career criminal sister which makes things even worse.

My husband is not supportive at all. He told me that I’m cuckoo & that everyone thinks that I’m cuckoo, especially after what I did recently.

I don’t think that I did anything wrong. To hell with them all. We don’t have any kids.

I never liked kids. Also, I don’t want to have messed up kids even if I wanted to have kids.

Living with physical & mental disabilities is a living hell. Most people do judge disabled people which sucks too.

I think you were right to request the wellness check. Better safe than sorry. Left alone, as he was, anything could have happened to him. Clearly, he could not look after himself and should not have been left on his own.

His being moved to an assisted living facility sounds like what he needed. I hope it's a decent place. Some are better than others. Anything is better than him being in a house by himself.

I'm sorry you don't have family that are really family to you. It doesn't sound like that will ever change, which is sad. Sometimes you have to let go and accept that people are unlikely to change. Maybe they can't. We all need others in our lives. I hope you can find relationships that you will want to invest in. Some people you have to give up on.

Thanks. I don’t understand why he’s so upset with me. I also don’t understand why my husband thinks that I was being inappropriate & crazy too, ugh!

They are very toxic & abusive, so I won’t bother to contact him anymore.

It’s obvious that they don’t care about me at all.

I don’t really know exactly what is going on but I’m wondering if your dad is angry you got a wellness check on him because he wasn’t consulted?

Don't take anything your dad has said to heart. It sounds like he has some dementia. Your mom and sister may have denigrated you to him. It does sound like your family's dynamics are quite toxic.

It also sounds like your husband is in the habit of putting you down. No one deserves to have their spouse talking to them the way he talks to you. He seems to see you as an easy target. You have every right to protest his disrespectful manner. If there is still love in this marriage, then maybe you could sit hubby down and tell him that calling you "crazy" is not okay. Arguing with hubby won't help. I would recommend that you learn how to give him the cold shoulder when he talks to you in an insulting way. Walk away from him when he gets that out of line. But tell him why. Then ignore him until he speaks decently to you.

Your husband is habituated to looking down on you. It's a bad habit that will be hard to break. But listening to those put-downs is damaging your soul. That family of yours got you used to being talked to like you were nothing. So hubby figured he could do the same to you. It's time you stopped being everyone's whipping-girl. Hold your head up and stop believing the stupid stuff you've been hearing from mom, sis and hubby. You are a precious human being. Tell yourself that everyday. Until you believe it, no one else will.

Excellent post Rose.

I’d like to add that your dad may possibly be angry with you that you got the well-being check on him but the background of your relationship sounds so difficult that unfortunately it sounds like this is how he’s always treated you. That’s in no way your fault.

It sounds like your family may have assigned you the role of ‘scapegoat’ but there’s so much dysfunction there you couldn’t possibly be treated with respect.

Who onows? He’s a weirdo. He cryptically told me to not tell anyone anything before he moved out to the assisted living facility.

Idk why he’d do tyat. I asked for the number & the address but he didn’t want to give it to me.

Weird! Isn’t that weird?

Why would he be mad at me for that? I was looking out for him.

He’s a narcissist control freak.

I was always the scapegoat & the black sheep. I never tried to go out of my way to please them & they hated that as they’re all abusive, self absorbed & selfish people who need constant attention & vsliin order to feel good about themselves.

They hate the fact that they can’t control me. I was also my parents free therapist since I was 11 or 12 years old.

They’ all have severe mental health problems that they all refuse to get help for.

If I knew of anyone living in the conditions your father was living in - feces on the floor - I would call for a wellness check or make a report to Adult Protection Services . . . whether that individual wanted me to or not. Not to do so would be irresponsible and could set the stage for a tragic mishap.

If your dad truly does not want you to visit him in the assisted living facility, then you'll have to respect that and abide by his decision. It's a sad state of affairs, but his having that attitude does not necessarily reflect poorly on you. This family is very screwed up in ways that you did not cause. Losing contact with any of them - or all of them - might actually bring more peace into your life. Sometimes, if you hang back and leave them alone, so the "ball is in their court," they might someday initiate contact with you. Try hanging back for a good little while.

[QUOTE=jesyka;7452395]

Who knows? He’s a weirdo. He cryptically told me to not tell anyone anything before he moved out to the assisted living facility.

Idk why he’d do that. I asked for the number & the address but he didn’t want to give it to me.

Weird! Isn’t that weird?

Why would he be mad at me for that? I was looking out for him.

He’s a narcissist control freak.

I was always the scapegoat & the black sheep. I never tried to go out of my way to please them & they hated that as they’re all abusive, self absorbed & selfish people who need constant attention & validation order to feel good about themselves.

They hate the fact that they can’t control me. I was also my parents free therapist since I was 11 or 12 years old.

They all have severe mental health problems that they all refuse to get help for.

Thanks for letting me know that I’m not the unreasonable person here. Maybe my nasty sister had something to do with him not talking to me anymore.

She is very greedy & broke. I have a bad feeling tyat no one will tell me anything when he dies.

She is probably committing elder abuse. It sure sounds like it since they left him alone in a filthy house by himself & they didn’t even check up on him at all he said.

I’m did call APS weeks ago but they can’t teally do much of anything without any proof.

I give up on them. They’re all insane. Thanks for your kind words.

If your sister is "greedy and broke" and your dad has even two nickles to rub together, you can pretty much expect that she's going to do everything she can to grab those two nickles and make sure that you don't get even one of them.

To leave your father in the squalid conditions he was in is definitely elder abuse. It is morally wrong. However, in the USA there is no legal responsibility for adult children to care for, or about, an elderly parent. So that's how they get away with doing that. Even more unfortunately, the local authorities are rather slow to intervene in such a situation, where an elder is living in filth or otherwise not competent to manage their daily life. That's because Americans place high value on letting people do what they want. The results of that are sometimes unconscionable.

That’s so difficult for you. The way I’m reading this though is that he’s in assisted living now and hopefully there will be an eye kept on him there.

If you’ve been assigned the scapegoat role in the dynamics of this dysfunctional family there isn’t a lot you can do,

Kudos to you that you cared enough to report his neglect, that was imo the right thing to do, although it wasn’t well received by your dad it was in his best interest. It’s such a shame your family aren’t capable of treating you with the same care and concern.

You did the right thing by reporting it and I'm sorry he has reacted this way.

My father had no connection to any of us for 20 years. He lived in a hoarded house 10 hours away from us. He had a stroke and it was 3 days before he was found. He lay in his own urine for all that time which left him with a huge sore on his back. He wound up with a breathing tube, feeding tube, IVs and a catheter, none of which he wanted. My brother and I went to say goodbye but we were the only ones because he had just been so nasty to everyone for so long. He eventually died and several of the causes were related to laying on that floor for so long.


His landlord said nobody knew what to do to help him. I will always be sad that nobody knew to call adult protective services just for the way he was living. He had no electric because of the hoarding. He wasn't taking care of himself. He was severely mentally ill. And he suffered greatly for it in the last 2 months of his life.

I know it hurts but you may have saved your father from going through something similar. And nobody should go through that. Ever.

@BeyondtheRainbow - your story is an example of how bad things can go when no one is keeping track of an elder. Sometimes the elder has set himself up for this by a lifetime of behavior that alienated his family from him. Still, no one wishes to see anyone wind up in such distressful circumstances. However, local authorities are not geared up to do a whole lot about discovering and intervening in these situations. It takes a concerned citizen or family member to activate the system. An elder's inability to self-care has to be pretty extreme before anything much happens. Even then, it can take someone advocating and pushing to get the elder into a safe arrangement.

Often community social workers will contract with a homecare agency to send home attendants. I've known home attendants who spoke of visiting elders who had next to no food in their kitchens. Sometimes it's because they had family coming around taking their Social Security money. The attendant would report this to the homecare agency. These agencies are out for the money and don't want to rock the boat. So they don't alert social service agencies of the local government. I heard of a woman with dementia who was wandering half-naked through the halls of her apartment building, according to a home attendant who visited her. Not much was being done about it. It seems that the system doesn't really have accountability built into in. Some relatives of these incompetent elders care only about getting whatever the elder owns. They "borrow" from the elder's Social Security income. They don't want their elder going into a nursing home because that usually means the Socual Security checks stop. The O.P. has done the correct, moral thing. Sometimes doing the right thing is thankless.

I think anyone who knows of an elder living in bad circumstances does the right thing in getting some intervention underway.

You’re right about what you said. My loser sister intends to steal the house from me & maybe even my mom too.

My mom trusts her unfortunately so although my mom is the trustee according to this lawyer I recently had a consultation with, she is supposed to send me the legal paperwork when the time comes.

My mom blocked me on her phone years ago. I think
My sister convinced her to block me.

The lawyer said that my mom will be held in contempt of court if she doesn’t send me the paperwork then so in that case, the trustee status will be given to me then.

I can’t afford a lawyer unfortunately as they charge a lot & I don’t think that they offer payment plans.

My only option then is to file the legal paperwork myself in that county. I live 7 hours away from them

I work f/t & I’ll start a second p/t job in a frw weeks.

So I’ll have no time to do anything, ufh. I think that I’ll probably loose everything & get nothing when the time comes

My husband refuses to help me with anything unfortunately. It’s like he doesn’t care if we loose out on inheriting a house to where our portion of the sales would probably come put to at keast $200000.

My mom is extremely naieve & stupid. My sister might even be able to steal whatever was supposed to go to my mom. Everything is supposed to be divided equally.

No information was given about where my moms jewelry will go to or where the money in the checking & savings will go.

My sister has ful access to the safe & the accounts.

My dad is obviously very stupid & crazy as he still thinks that my sister is a good person & that she still cares about him even after she left him to die probably in a filfthy house.

I don’t understand why he didn’t move out sooner as he has good life insurance that pays for everything for the assited living facility.

APS was called but I don’t think that much can be done without proof. I guess being abandoned in a filfthy house isn’t enough to qualify as abuse.

It sickens & disturbs me to know that my evil sister will end up getting away with everything while I get nothing at all probably.

Then recently my dad decided to stop talking to me. She probably got freaked out that I called APS & that I know what’s going on.

She is an extremely manipulative & desperate career criminal, ugh!

What are my options now?

Yes, he’s now in an assisted living facility. I don’t understand to why he willingly stayed in a filthy house alone though when he could’ve moved out a lot sooner.

I thought at first that my extremely cheap dad didn’t want to spend any money on an assisted living facility He actually has long term mice insurance.

They paid for everything. I’m
guessing that he was expecting my mom & my sister to move back home to take care of him.

I can only aaume that he didn’t want to be by himself, but then he finally had to move because tgey refused to take care of him anymore.

He probably wanted to be around everything that he is used to.

He is extremely stubborn.

I’m extremely hurt that they chose to a use me then abandon me. I don’t deserve to be treated like this.

Sorry to hear about your dad. Was he a narcissist? My dad is an insane idiot.

I don’t understand why he still thinks that my sister still caresabout him. She clearly doesn’t She us a huge liar & a manipulator too. I think that she even stole his debit card tgat he got in the mail.

He said that she called him a liar regarding the card. I’m not sure about whT happened. One card went missing.

His wallet was misplaced supposedly too but then he found it again.

I wish that I never even tried to help him now. Theg are clearly nasty & insane idiots

Wow, it sounds like elder abuse is more common than I realized. Also, it definitely sounds like not much can be done or that law enforcement does very little to nothing about anything.

It’s disturbing & disgusting. It sounds like it’s easy to get away with abusing elderly people who can no longer care for themselves as long as no one reports things. Am I right about that?

What I've posted is based on many years working as a nurse, mainly doing geriatric care. Also, I've heard things from others who are nurses or home attendants.

I spent some time working gero-psych in a psychiatric hospital. Some folk who are unable to care for themselves are unwilling to accept any help. They won't even let home attendants enter where they live. If their situation is dire enough, they can be forcibly admitted to a gero-psych unit. A doctor can decide that initially. If the patient protests, a court hearing is held in the hospital within a few days to a week or so. Every inpatient psych facility has a room that can be used as a court room. A judge shows up and listens to testimony from staff and also from the patient (and possibly family/friends.) The nurse's main responsibility is to observe and document how much help the patient needs to bathe, dress, eat, use the bathroom, etc. Also: is the patient aware of danger . . . confused, seeing or hearing things that aren't there . . . belligerant, assaultive toward staff . . . and anything else that could be relevant. No doctor can order someone into a nursing home or confine them in the psych hospital for long. Only a judge can do that. Taking away someone's freedom and self-determination is not a medical decision. It's a decision for a judge to make, after considering the opinions of doctors and others and of the patient.

I knew someone who was in a nursing home, short-term, to get physical therapy. Acting on behalf of the family, I wanted him admitted longterm to the nursing home on Medicaid because he could not cope at home alone, mainly due to dementia, but also due to physical impairment. Toward the end of the rehab, the hospital was saying they could discharge him home and he'ld be fine. The physical therapist assessed him as competent to go home alone. The social service staff said he'ld be okay on his own. So I talked to the nurses. They totally agreed with me. I had to strongly push the issue, but I got him admitted longterm with a pending application for Medicaid, which was awarded to him.

Professionals sometimes have wrong opinions. A psychiatrist told me that the gentleman I just described was pretty competent, mentally. I told her to go ask him where he lived because I knew he wouldn't be able to tell her. She did ask him and was surprised that he didn't know his own address. So you cannot depend even on experts to reach appropriate conclusions. It really takes a caring advocate to get the elder into the care setting that will be best for him or her.

You must always ask yourself, "What incentivization is driving the decisions of the people involved?" M O N E Y has a lot to do with it. The nursing home didn't want to admit someone who might not get approved for Medicaid. If my friend were denied that, then the nursing home wouldn't get paid for the time he spent there after the rehab was finished. (Medicare pays for that.) So the administration weren't eager to admit him to a longterm bed. Some staff are very attuned to what the administrators want and they push things in the direction that earns them brownie points from administration.

My friend would probably have been found dead in his apartment, were it not for me advocating for him. My point is not to get a pat on the back for what I did, but to illustrate how tough it can be to steer things toward an appropriate outcome. Were it not for my experience in nursing, I probably would have felt helpless to influence what would happen.

My friend lived in a HUD-subsidized apartment complex for seniors. A number of his fellow tenants were discovered dead in their apartments over the years that he lived there. I'm not sure who to blame, but it seems we could come up with a better way to monitor isolated elders.

That’s horrible! It’s disgusting to how these places only care about the money.

What ends up happening to sick and or disabled people who have no health insurance & no money?

It’s a good thing that your friend had you therefore to advocate for him.

If a poor person cannot cope due to age and disability, they are entitled to go into a nursing home and to have Medicaid pick up the tab. However, first someone must get the ball rolling by reporting the person as being in distress.

That’s sad. How poor do you have to ne to get treatment?