Spiral downward after trip

Leaderoftheband

We just got home from a 2 week trip to see kids and grandkids. Our flight home yesterday was canceled and we ended up on a red eye last night. The trip was taxing for my DW but the overnight flight was brutal for her. Needless to say today has been a bad day. Will she recover with rest or do these type ordeals never truly right themselves? Considering alternative future trips

Marta

Time will tell. Each person is different. In the near future it likely will be best to have family come to you, and even have them stay in a hotel if your home is not large, just to cut down on all the hustle and bustle.

Jo C.

Hello Leader; I am sorry for what happened in what you had hoped would be a pleasant journey; I can imagine the fallout has also been exhausting for you.  It may take a bit of time for your wife to get back to her usual baseline.  Routine and structure with a bit of patience will be important during this time period; it will be helpful that she is in the familiarity and peaceful environment of home.

As an aside, once a certain point in dementia has been reached, such changes with trips away from home can become a negative that is not tolerated for our Loved Ones, (LOs).   Routine and structure of their days becomes a significant positive and changes become negatives.  Processing all the different inputs coming at our LOs in unfamiliar places and dynamics with noise and difficulty experiencing all that is whirling around them with travel, and being in multiple different settings with multiple different people can cause our LOs anxiety and upset often with negative outcomes.

As Marta suggested, this may now be an awareness of being more of a positive to have your family come to your home rather than you to theirs.  We had set things up that way ourselves.  Instead of buying tickets or using frequent flyer miles for ourselves, we bought tickets or used the miles for LOs to fly to us, children and all.  If staying in your home would not be workable, then having a nearby hotel room for the guests or helping to pay for hotel rooms if one is able to do so, can also be helpful in order to get some down time at night and in the morning with a bit of respite for both yourself and your wife.  This may mean shorter visits of a week rather than two weeks, but it is about the quality of the visits and not the duration. There are still good memories to be made.

As your wife settles back into being home with comforting routine to her days, things should even out.  I would imagine you too will need a bit of time to recoup from all the challenges you had to deal with.  Let us know how you are and how things are going, we will be thinking of you and your dear wife,

J.