My husband has dementia and Parkinson disease and he wets the bed. He wears pull up briefs i.e. depends and I also, have a pad and chux to use at nighttime. My problem is he wanders doing the night and he takes his briefs off during the night and he gets off of the pad and chux during the night. My question: Is there a mattress pad or something heavy enough that will cover the whole bed, that will absorb urine and keep the bed dry at night time?
I think there are alarms for the bed would alert you when he gets up as well.
Angel
Any suggestions on how to keep Depends on him will be appreciated!
Waterproof Mattress and Pillow Protectors
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Double mattress protector (54”x75”)
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This is how I prevent my mother-in-law from taking her depend underwear off. The worst thing is she uses her hands to handle her bowel content making it a mess in the room. Now I put her in an adult one piece jump suit at night to alleviate this problem. There are 2 types of one piece jumpsuits: The first one is with zipper at the back. The only problem is my mom sleeps facing up. Zipper at the back makes her very uncomfortable. I found a place overseas (a Hong Kong University fashion design department community based store) that makes adult jump suites with specially designed zipper at the front (2 zippers total, 1 to unzip the top, and the other one to unzip from the bottom to make it easier to remove her underwear after the bowel movement). These zipper can only be unzipped using a small pen-shaped stick that I keep. I found this front loaded zipper jumpsuits fit my mother-in-law's needs. The only problem is it requires a lot of work to have it made because I cannot find stores in North America that makes this kind of jump suits. There are lots of stores selling the back zipper jump suits but not the front zipper one in North America. To make the jump suit, I need to mail one of my mother-in-law's top and pant (as sample) and the money to my friend in Hong Kong. The University store will then make the suits based on the sample received. The cost is very reasonable, it is around US$35 for no sleeve jumpsuit, and US$50 for long-sleeve jumpsuits. The reason is the fashion department is operating the store as a non-profit learning place for their students. It took them about 2 weeks to make the jumpsuits. After that, my friend picked up the finished product and mailed it back to me in Canada. Now she is wearing custom made jump suits that eliminate wetting the bed problem for us. The only thing is they purposely made the bottom part (pant) bigger in order to fit in the zipper as well as make it easy for caregivers to access the underwear. In addition, it makes putting the jumper suit on a pretty simple take. My mother-in-law now looks like is wearing a clown's trouser at night.
A final thing to remember is actually a warning:
As dementia progresses, you may not want to be alone with him if this progresses to Alzheimer's because as it progresses, a person may become violent. This is where you may have to resort to putting him into an institution where he can get the help he really needs. You will know where your limit is and when it's time, don't put yourself in danger
The other hint I have is for keeping an eye on the patient. My husband used to get up and walk around at night. I bought a baby monitor so I could see what he was doing. I slept in the next room. However, I constantly heard what sounded like his walker, and I'd get up to check on him. Usually it was just furnace, or maybe he moved around in bed. So I bought a security monitor--by Bubba -- very reasonable, and now I know if he is actually out of bed. When the chime does go off, I can look at the monitor to see if he is up or just moving around in the bed. Sure saves me a lot of sleepless nights. His meds have been adjusted so he does not get up as much as he used to.
In the case of my elderly friend, he had no constant hand movement. I noticed nothing out of the ordinary with him until he started frequent flying the squad to the ER more than a normal person would. This became a problem for everyone around him including our medics. He also had some other behavioral issues, but I would've never guessed he had early dementia onset.