Suggestions with Bowel incontinence and dementia care

Please check my notes below: urban Jane. Installing the stimulator only takes a few minutes in the hospital, and the bladder Botox which last about three months takes less than five minutes in the urologist office. You need a rectal surgeon to install the leads for the stimulator.

Hi Siobhan 21
This change in your mother's bathroom habits is a very consequential one. Not only are you left with a tough and time consuming activity to manage, but it limits your ability to leave her with someone else accompanying her (unless that is a trained caregiver). I am sorry you are facing all of this at once.

Cause. If the bowel movements are of normal consistency ( solid) then the cause is probably not a dietary issue, but the dementia. If they are suddenly loose, then that may be part of why she is less able to control them and there may be something you can do around diet. My husband first found out that he was lactose intolerant: we cut out dairy and his loose BMs stopped. Then it started again. He cut out caffeine and that solved it for a long time. Then it came back. A doctor friend suggested we cut out fruits and fruit juice. That has take n care of the issue pretty well. But his dementia progressed, so unless we get him to the bathroom at the right times, we have clean up to do. Thank goodness he has not fought the use of pull ups and diapers.

Assistive device to consider for now of the future. Her mobility issues create a special challenge. For a time, my husband's mobility seemed to be diminishing fast. I seriously considered buying a sit-to-stand lift, which helps raise a person up if that is the key mobility issue. They can also be used with a toileting harness so that you can move the person from the bedside or chair to the toilet. They are expensive and Medicare does not pay for them but you may find a used one online. You can look up the models on the Bestcare LLC site. They have good videos on how they work. (FYI Medicare will pay for a Hoyer lift but that seems beyond what you need.

The nuts and bolts. There is so much about dealing with bowel incontinence at home that nobody tells you. A few things that have made all the difference for us:

1. An add on bidet seat on the toilet. The "wash" feature does not do the full clean up but helps with that and it also tends to stimulate them to have a complete bowel movement.

2. Foam. OMG That is the best product ever invented. I use Medline Remedy Essentials Cleanse No-Rinse Foam cleanser. No odor, does the job. The job is this: It dissolves fecal matter so that it is easy to wipe off. It also makes the process much more pleasant for your mother, because the foam feels like a soft layer against her skin instead of the comparatively hard feel of the wipes alone. It was sooo helpful particularly in the early stages when "cleaning up " was new for my husband.

3. Wipes. Get the large ones ( 7.5 X 11 or so).

4. I put in a frame around the toilet long ago. that gives him "arms" to put his hands on to lower himself onto the toilet and lift himself up.

5. During the day he wears pull ups but we now put a "guard"/pad on the front and back to prevent catastrophic accdents and to make it easy to chang out the pads if that is all that is affected. At night, he wears two diapers, with a pad inside the front of the first one (without the paper cove over the sticky tape removed, so that it is easy to remove). When I check on him at 1 am I may need to just change the pad, or may take out the pad and the first diaper. We try to get to him before he has a BM in the morning so he has it in the toilet. He's not predictable enough to make that a common occurrence.

6. I used to have to do a lot of laundry (pajamas and sheets) in the early stages of his bladder incontinence. Then I stopped having him wear pajama bottoms. And I got a 3 pack of those large pads that are fabric but backed with a moisture proof barrier. I use one of those in the area where he sleeps and two of the disposable blue backed pads over that. Since we started using the double diaper, etc. I rarely have to change those, but they are there for the exceptional times.

I hope that something in the above is of use to you.