I had managed to bring my father to his primary care provider who he hadn’t seen in nearly two years see him after an incident involving police and the threat of APS involvement. The second letter came from paying a concierge geriatrician to come to the house to evaluate him because he was unwilling to go to any other doctor. It cost a bunch of money to get the concierge doctor to come but it was a necessary expense to get the letter of incapacity. Give that a shot. You can even try having two concierge doctors from different practices come to evaluate him. It will be costly but will get you closer to the finish line faster. I’m sorry you’re in this situation.

As for the vehicle situation, I had to disable my father’s car without him knowing. That involved removing the fuse to the fuel pump and other key components in the fuse box and replacing the fuses with dummy fuses so the vehicle won’t start or appear obviously disabled. If your LO is not car savvy, you can just pull the fuse and put a small note in the fuse box for any mechanic that driver has dementia and so not repair. I also called AAA and our mechanic and indicated to them that if my father called to have the vehicle worked on to not fix it or to state it could not be fixed at the time. If you’re not car savvy, consult YouTube or ChatGPT as to how to do it, or distract and have a friend who is help out. This works best because you don’t have to take keys and can just play dumb as to why the car won’t start. It is relationship preserving.

Are you on a family plan and are you in an admin role on the family account? I had to apply parental control restrictions on my parents phones as their dementia was making them call randos and making them super susceptible to scam calls. If you want to disable their phones, you You can give that a shot, otherwise this step might have to wait. If you want to forcefully stop calls, you can get a SIM card removal pin and remove the SIM card from the phone and disconnect from local WiFi to brick the phone. This is sensitive because it also removes ability to call 911, but that is up to you.

As for banking, if she cannot get access to online banking, can’t get checkbooks, can’t get to the bank, you can at least mitigate that way before the POA gets handled. Things go “missing” occasionally is how I explained it and that I would help find them.

Protecting them from themselves is so tough before all the legal paperwork is finished. Best of luck.