Insanity in my own Backyard

It's amazing the fucked up things you find out about your family when you are an adult. There have been issues with my mother's parents lately about my grandpa, who is a parapalegic, and my grandma who we seemed to think was getting alzheimers. She hasn't been taking care of my grandpa all that well and when nurses are sent to take care of him, my grandma kicks them out. She puts him in the hospital and some of his decubidi (bedsores - stage 4, bleech!) tend to heal up some. But then when he gets home, they get worse again. And back in he goes. My mom suspects my grandma has been debriding them herself somehow and then he goes into shock when she does that so has to go back into the hospital again. She wants him gone, she wants him home. She says that she won't take care of him and won't feed him, she says that she's taking great care of him. It's just been an insane roller coaster ride that I have been fortunate enough to keep myself out of, but it's driving my mom and aunt insane.

The latest drama had my mom picking my grandpa up from the hospital to take back home. Grandma got wind of this and called the hospital and said that she can't take him. She ended up taking him home anyway and was met there by my aunt and a nurse. My grandma actually said, in front of the nurse even (she usually doesn't do it in front of non-family members), that she wasn't going to take care of him and isn't going to feed him and that he can just die there cuz she's sick of taking care of him. So the nurse called adult social services saying that she didn't think he'd be safe there and told them what she had said. They sent a social worker out there who stayed and talked to my grandparents alone for quite a while. When he came out he said that he didn't see anything wrong and they sound perfectly fine. He left and my mom and aunt were still there and then tried to see their parents again. This time my grandma had her son on the phone (he lives out of state) and whatever she had told him he demanded to speak with my mom and aunt and he started yelling at them telling them to leave their parents alone and that he was going to call the police if they didn't leave. So who knows what she told him. She has also been trying to tell people that my grandpa has dementia so she can get him committed. But whenever he is in the hospital, no one observes any signs of dementia so they can't diagnose it and cannot commit him without his consent.

After that happened my mom came and talked to me about it. Then she said that her and her sister have been talking about it and thinking back and remembering that their mom had always been like that. She'd get mad for no apparent reason, deny she said or done things, accused people of taking things or moving things when she had removed them herself. But they grew up with that and just thought it was normal. All that was new to me. I thought that this was a recent development. Even though I spent a lot of time with them when I was a kid, I never really saw this kind of behaviour from her. It was only about 5 or so years ago when I stopped visiting them and I would get yelled at for not going to visit them when I was visiting nearly every week. But grandma would get mad at me for not coming. Then my grandpa would get mad at me for not coming to see my grandma. So after a while it got so bad I decided I didn't need to deal with that. If they were going to yell at me and accuse me of not visiting then I would at least deserve the accusations and not visit. That's when I first noticed her behaviour. But my mom said she'd always been like that. And she told me that when she found out she was pregnant with me (she was still living at home) her mom started punching her in the stomach. She said "I packed my things and that's when your dad came and took me away."

You always know that your family isn't quite right. But it's quite a shock to hear these things. So now, my mom and aunt are thinking that their mom has some sort of personality disorder. Another note, my grandma has been a nurse all her life. So I'm sure she knows what she has and how to hide it from the right people. Cuz that's what she does. Anyone who can do anything about it to help her, her own doctors, the social worker, she is able to hide it and seem absolutey normal and rational. Even my grandpa backs her up. I don't know if it's just because he's protecting her because she's his wife, or if there is something else up there. But with both of them giving the same happy little story, no one can do anything about it. Sigh....