Is forgetting always a bad thing?

I would certainly consider that there may be a problem. Typically one would remember a movie that they saw a week ago, or even a month ago. If she is watching the same movie week after week, and, claims to have never watched it before, there may be some problems. If she is an older woman, dementia or a similar condition could be the culprit behind the issue. If it doesn’t seem like she is at the age in which such psychiatric issues would be prevalent, perhaps medications or other substances could be hampering her memory. Then again, there is the distinct possibility that she actually remembers watching the movie but chooses to say otherwise for any number of reasons.

Not really no, she gets to enjoy that movie over and over. However memory loss can render us disabled of course.

Getting a lot of miles out of one DVD might not be a problem, but that kind of forgetting would seem to be. It points to other memory issues that can greatly interfere with life.

During his last three years, my father-in-law could make do with one conversational topic, endlessly recycled. It might have been economical for him, but it drove other people nuts to hear the same comments a thousand times, sometimes only a few minutes apart. He couldn’t follow the plot of a movie or remember the action during a football game while the game was still on.

He also forgot who his sons were during the time it took them to leave the room and come back. As a result he thought they were intruders and kept screaming at them to get out and quit stealing his stuff, even when they were bringing the groceries in or bringing him a meal. This made life pretty rough on my husband and his brother.

On the other hand, it was probably a mercy that he forgot he had cancer as soon as they left the oncologist’s office.

I’m guessing that your mother-in-law must be in her eighties or late seventies. Has she been evaluated by a professional?

Unless she is a raging alcoholic it is a problem.

How old is she? Does she forget other things too? You might be able to label it, but whatever it is, it’s probably not fixable. Part of old age for some people. Nice that she is not troubled by it, though.

She is 90 years old and lives in a retirement home apartment. She forgets many other things, but there are several family members who help her on a daily basis. The home she is in provides meals and other activities, plus a variable level of care.

It seemed odd to me, but not a problem, that she always chooses the same movie to watch on her self appointed movie night.

Its depends on her age. There are many cases in which, after 65 such kind of problem is normal to every old people.

When my mother was in her mid-90’s, diagnosed with senile dementia and under a geriatric doc’s care, she often reread the same light novels from her in-house library.

We were fine with that because we understood medically what was going on.

@YARNLADY: Before you can evaluate your mother-in-law’s behavior, remember that it is relevant to her medical diagnoses. A random event, such as leaving her car keys in the freezer, is different from predictable and routine short-term memory loss.

My mother couldn’t remember, ten minutes after the event, whether she had brushed her teeth. We had a daily care-giver help out plus a complicated system of checks and balances for me, my sister, her husband and the nursing staff at my mother’s facility.

My sister-in-law and her two adult children get the brunt of helping, since they are near by. When Hubby was visiting every week end in July she always greeted him with surprise, since she didn’t remember he was coming.

He communicates with her daily on the computer, and sometimes she asks him when he is coming over. She forgets we live 500 miles away.

She gets a lot of interaction with the people in the nursing home, and participates in daily activities. She really enjoys her home, a private, one bedroom apartment with a very nice patio.

@YARNLADY: Does your mother-in-law have a diagnosis of either senile dementia or Alzheimer’s? If so, then her happily watching the same movie weekly is typical and not a problem in the general scheme of either disease.

@gailcalled Not yet, but she is getting more forgetful all the time. Her doctor told Sis that it is just normal aging.

At 90, it seems to be normal…and whether she has an official diagnosis or not, there is no known cure or even any efficacious meds. My mother was on something called Aricept, which the doc. said that she should take on faith, but we thought it was ineffective and unnecessary.

The medical research and literature bears this out, with a few studies saying that it might help, a little, possibly, in the early stages.

The fact that she is both in a facility with care and supervision available and has her own little apartment with a patio that she loves sounds like a wonderful solution.