Bad visits are just so disappointing

I would say about 1/3 of my visits to see my parent in the hospital are very poor though I shouldn't complain because she is never mad at me which is a blessing.

It's just so disappointing to have a terrible visit because the drive is terrible, a geriatric psychiatric unit is just not an easy place to be even a well run good one and seeing a parent with dementia is hard and I have an enormous amount of stuff I should be doing at home.

Today when I arrived at the hospital my parent was in a panic that 3 people were murdered in her room and she had to scream for help and call the police and she was quite shaken up by this incident as one might be if it really happened. I tried to acknowledge the terribleness of this event, how scared she must feel and change the topic to something else but she kept going on and on about it and looked so exhausted and scared and insisted it wasn't a dream even though no one said it was. Maybe she took my and the staff's lack of horror to be invalidating. It's kind of hard to muster up more than an "oh my this sounds horrible, are you ok? Thank god you're safe" response when hearing this type of story.

And then I drove 45 minutes in traffic to a very messy house and crying kids and million things to do which this type of visit leaves me too exhausted to do.