For eleven years Jacqueline Marcell, then a television executive, pleaded with her elderly father to allow a caregiver to help him with her ailing mother, but after 55 years of loving each other he adamantly insisted on caring for her himself. Every caregiver Marcell hired eventually quit. “Jacqueline, I just can't work with your father,” one of them said. “His temper is impossible to handle. I don't think he’ll accept help until he's on his knees himself.”
When Marcell’s mother nearly died from an infection caused by her father’s inability to continue to care for her, Marcell flew from southern California to San Francisco to try to save her mother’s life, having no idea that in the process it would nearly end her own.
“I spent three months nursing my 82-pound mother back to relative health, while my father said he loved me one minute, but then he’d call me nasty names and throw me out of the house the next,” she says. “I was stunned to see him get so upset. Even running the washing machine could cause a tizzy and there was no way to reason with him. It was so heart wrenching to have my once-adoring father turn against me.”
But at the doctor’s office her father acted normal. “I couldn’t believe it when the doctor looked at me as if I was the crazy one,” Marcell says. The doctor didn’t even take her seriously when she reported that her father nearly electrocuted her mother. Luckily Marcell walked in three seconds before he plugged in a power strip that was soaking in a tub of water—along with her mother’s feet. “Later, I was furious to find out my father had instructed his doctor not to listen to anything I said, because I was just a liar and all I wanted was his money!”
Marcell says her father had never laid a hand on her, but one day nearly choked her to death for adding HBO to his television, even though he had eagerly consented to it a few days before. “Terrified, I dialed 911 for the first time in my life and the police took him to the hospital for evaluation. I was so shocked when they released him right away, saying they couldn't find anything wrong with him. What’s even more astonishing is that similar incidents occurred three more times.”
Marcell refers to her situation as a Caregiver Catch 22. “I was trapped. I couldn't leave my mother alone with my father—she’d surely die from his inability to care for her. I couldn't get healthcare professionals to believe me. My father was always so darling and sane in front of them. I couldn't get medication to calm him, and even when I finally did, he refused to take it, threw it in my face, or flushed it down the toilet. Even when I found a caregiver, no one would put up with him very long. I couldn't place my mother in a nursing home—he’d just take her out. I couldn't put him in a home—he didn't qualify. They both refused assisted living. Legally I couldn't force them. I became a prisoner in my parents' home for nearly a year trying to solve crisis after crisis, crying rivers daily, and infuriated with an unsympathetic medical system that wasn't helping me appropriately.”
Part 2 of this story will appear tomorrow.
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