I am sole caretaker for my mom who is 80, lives alone in her home, she is visually impaired and has, diabetes and afib. We have a long standing plan for me to call her or check on her everyday at certain times. Lately, she just goes about her day with total neglect to accept my phone calls at the designated times..which means I must get ready and go there to physically check on her. I don't normally mind much but I just had a surgery less than 2 weeks ago and am not supposed to be driving or climbing steps. She's knows these things but in spite of it she still doesn't answer her phone. I tried discussing this with her and she just laughed at me and told me I didn't need to worry about her. I'm just about at my wit's end. Can anyone give me any ideas on how to handle this? If I tear thus surgery up I'm going to have a worse problem next time around. Help please!!!!
What you may want to try is backing off just a little bit and making yourself a little less available to see what happens. I would do this for a short time just to see if maybe she might start calling you for a change. Someone here mentioned dial-up Internet, I remember those days where my phone line would be constantly busy for 16 hours at a time. I went into the software and had windows set to stay connected, and connect automatically when I got disconnected. I'm not sure if dial-up is still popular or very many people use it anymore, especially now that we have Wi-Fi, a step up from DSL (or broadband if you please). Yes, we've come a long way and getting a hold of our loved ones was especially hard if they were connected to the Internet via dial-up. Now we have Wi-Fi and use filters for it to not interrupt LAN line usage. Not having your phone line tied up by dial-up makes it much easier to get a hold of love ones
Don't forget, she's the adult, and you are just the "child", and in her mind you are still that active teenager or 20 year old.
As for the phone, I remember those days when I would get a busy signal for several hours. I would go into panic thinking either something terrible happened or Dad was on his computer on dial-up and forgot to log out.
I know exactly how you feel, I call my mom 2X a day and if she doesn't answer, I'll wind up going over to check on her, even though she lives in independent living. If your mom won't cooperate, you just have to back off and do what you can do...maybe she can call you, which gives her more control. Would that work? If that doesn't work, you just have to let her live her life and if she has a stroke, she has a stroke. There's not much you can do if she won't cooperate.