You are really painting a picture of your mother-in-law's suffering. You didn't say so, but I will assume that this is not the way she has been all her adult life. It sounds like she has some problems with several areas of her thinking: at least memory, judgment, and planning seem not to be working well for her. For this to Alzheimer's or another of the memory loss diseases, these problems cannot be solely due to drugs/alcohol/medications or other medical conditions.
I recommend your mother-in-law have a good basic medical history and physical and some basic lab work. Opinions differ on brain scanning - I recommend it for people who are only mild to moderately impaired and have gotten that way relatively recently (< 2 years) - because those are the folks you are most likely to find something in the scanned brain that you can do something about (Make sense?).
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