Lots of Bad for Everyone

In the first week of my mother-in-law moving in with me, she fell in the bathroom. It was her fault for munching her sleeping pills beyond what she was prescribed, and then getting up over and over to go to the bathroom instead of staying in bed and falling asleep like the directions said. She liked to take her pills and get kind of loopy and try and chat up everyone in the household while she swayed with the breeze.

She bruised her ribs but she was okay. I took her sleeping pills away from her, which made her angry. She admonished me not to treat her "like a child". I kept the pills in a dispenser in my room and she would start asking for them repeatedly about a half hour before it was time to take them, and then kept asking until she got them. She would call our cell phones repeatedly if we were out shopping late, to make sure we were going to be getting in the house in time to give her these pills. I have all kinds of pill stories.

Then about a week later she showed me how all her teeth on the bottom along the front had broken off at the gum line. I was horrified and told her we needed to go to a dentist. She adamantly refused. She'd rather die. Her teeth cracking in half didn't hurt so no reason to see a dentist!

The month before she moved in with us, she'd been in and out of the hospital over the course of three weeks for severe dehydrations and malnutrition.

The backstory is that she read on the back of the sugar-free Ricola drop packages that you buy in bulk at Costco that each drop was the equivalent of one piece of fruit. It was for a diabetic exchange, but she ignored this fact. She decided she would eat nothing but sugar free ricola lozenges and altoids. Every day she consumed an entire bag of ricola and an entire tin of altoids. Gastrointestinal distress is an understatement of the resulting disaster zone. My father-in-law didn't tell us what was going on. When we came to visit, she was in the hospital and looked like she might die at any moment. She pulled through and got better, but it was slow and gradual.

So when she started calling my name from the bathroom, sounding like something was wrong, and asking for help and to "come look", I thought there was something really, really wrong. There were bad vibes oozing from the bathroom door as I approached.

I went inside, worried, and asked what was wrong. That's when she got me.

Yup, she just wanted to show me her poop. And because I was caught off-gaurd I looked. I was traumatized. I told my husband and sister. She tried to call me in the next day to get me to look again and I refused. Then when I wasn't around she tried to show my sister, but since forewarned is forearmed, she escaped unscathed.