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Hi everyone,haven't posted in a while.Hope everyone is doing good.
My alcoholic father in law is 80 and showing signs of dementia or alzheimers.He drinks constantly and has for years.Taught my husband everything he knows.I'm wondering what will happen to him if he needs to be put in a nursing home and can't have his constant stream of beer.Would he have to go to a detox center so he has help when he goes through DT's or just what would they do.I've seen people desperate enough for alcohol where they'll find anything with it in it...cologne,mouthwash,etc if they can't get what they want.I've mentioned this to my alkie hubby.I'm hoping he's picturing himself like his father if he makes it to that age.Maybe it will open his eyes but I doubt it will.
Thanks for any help,I just want to sit back and watch what happens.I have no lost love for this man.
My father in law was an alcoholic and had to be put in a nursing care facility for his dementia. You know what's weird? When the dementia really hit him, he stopped drinking. He was like a different person. His memory of his fights (and all the other emotional baggage) with my mother in law were gone and he was introducing her as his sweet beautiful wife. My mother in law was in shock. There were early times when he tried to sneak out and go find a drink but they caught him in his wheelchair before he'd get out the door, LOL. He started with the dementia at around 80, they put him in a home at 87, and he died last April just after turning 89.
I don't know about the detoxing, but it sounds essential for someone to tell the doctors involved that he needs to detox and can't just be clapped into the nursing home as is. There's also the problem of whether the nursing home would accept him if they knew he was an active alcoholic. In that case it may be that he needs to detox before going in.
I do know someone who was an alcoholic who went into a nursing home and just couldn't get the stuff, and so stopped drinking that way. Of course it will depend on whether the person is able, and whether there's an enabler to bring alcohol in. When people are further along in dementia, I don't think they'd be very effective alcoholics because they couldn't organize themselves enough to get hold of alcohol. It would be risky to leave a bottle with them, as they wouldn't know enough to stop before passing out. Of course, many alcoholics are at that point already.
Even if someone was in advanced stages of dementia and didn't know left from right anymore wouldn't their bodies need that booze without their minds telling them they do? If someone doesn't have the mental capacity or is stopped from getting to get his booze what happens to them? I've heard of people quitting cold turkey and it can be pretty bad.
Yes, they will need to detox, but after they have detoxed, their bodies won't have a physical need for alcohol. By that I mean that nothing bad medically will happen to them if they don't drink alcohol. They may have cravings, but if you've known people with dementia, you'll know that their personalities are quite different from what they were in their normal state. So it would not surprise me if the cravings got buried in all the other stuff. And they might start to figure out how to get alcohol, but after five minutes they'll forget what they were doing. And then they might think, "Hey, I want a drink, I'll sneak past the desk there and ..." but five minutes later they've forgotten again, even if they've sneaked past the desk. I'm sure if you put a case of beer down by their bed, they'd drink it. But that wouldn't happen in any halfway decent nursing home. So I think the hard part to get over is the detoxing, for which you'd want a doctor overseeing the situation. After that, unless they have easy access to alcohol, you're probably home free.
