High Anxiety / Anger Issues

jeffe

I am trying to help my 81 year old father who is my mothers primary caregiver. They still live in the house they raised 3 boys in for the last 56 years. I work two jobs one of which is caregiving for seniors in the evenings and weekends. I am the only one able to help my father as my younger brother has passed and my older brother lives out of state 3000k miles away.
My mother suffers from VERY high anxiety about everything from the cat to ceiling fans that she believes will fall any minute. My father takes her to 3 different Respite programs 2 of which are fairly new for mom and she is having agitation at the respite and doesn't believe my father will be picking her up even though he does faithfully every time for over a year now at the original respite which is expensive.
She is on anti anxiety meds that don't seem to really help. Does anyone have any suggestions? There is no long term care insurance and we are waiting to see if she will get accepted to Medicaid which could take many more months.
Any suggestions are welcome.

SusanB-dil

Hi jeffe - welcome to 'here', but sorry for the reason

Could the doc try a different anti-anxiety med? You may need to check in with a neurologist, or a geri-psych doctor for maybe better, or different medicines, or dosages. MIL's neurologist handles those types of meds for her. A geri-psych would probably have more experience and know-how.

jeffe

Thanks Susan. We did find a new Neurologist for he about a month ago. She did prescribe Abilify, but it is likely too low of a dose as we have not seen any changes in a month since she started it. I called into the office today to discuss that and i am waiting for a call back as her next dr appointment isn't until 9/17.

I will continue to pursue that path for now. Waiting for weeks for prescription changes is a very loong time for both of them to have to suffer daily in the mean time. Very Frustrating. Thanks again for the advice.

KMSKid

Hi, my mom is in MC. Even there, it is taking a long time to get her meds settled out. She is irritable, frustrated, spitting, hitting and kicking. I don’t understand why it takes so long to get the meds figured out, but I guess that’s just part of this process. It must be super hard to get it right when the person the doc is treating cannot tell them how they feel.