Having my mom here is honestly almost like the movie Ground Hog Day. Repeat the same things all day and start all over again the next morning. It's so sad. It's a little easier on dh because he doesn't have to "entertain" her like I feel like I do. He can go off to his den, work out in the shop or outside.
She will come down the stairs in the morning and say "boy, something sure smells good down here".....and I haven't even made coffee yet, LOL. Last evening DH was in his den watching something on his computer. I don't know how many times she asked me what he was watching/doing. Or the dogs. At times she knows we have 2, at other times, if only one happens to be in the room, she will ask "now how many dogs do you have again?"
Back before we moved her and DD and I had visited her a couple of times for 2-3 days, we had noticed her strange thing about throwing garbage away. Or like when dd was helping her pack to move the first time - old bottles of spices or whatever that just needed to be tossed in the garbage, she had to empty the jar or container first, into the garbage, and then throw away the jar or container. While she helps me clean up after a meal and food and scraps need to be thrown out into our garbage can, she will ask if it should go in the garbage can. I say yes, we don't have a garbage disposal. Then she says "oh, it's ok to put this in the garbage? they'll take it?" I'm like ya, we have to throw our garbage somewhere, our garbage can is the only place where we have to get rid of it. Weird.
Or like right now. We finished lunch and I said (at least twice) I had to go up to my office and do my grocery pick up order for tomorrow (because Walmart actually cancelled my WHOLE order on me Friday! I was so annoyed). I just placed the order again and then started typing this, figuring I'll do this as a break for a few minutes (LOL) and she comes up stairs and says "doing some work today?" No....doing my grocery order......
I did get the 2 jigsaw puzzles in the mail yesterday that I bought from Ebay. We started one yesterday afternoon. What a godsend! Something to do and keep us/her occupied for an hour or more at a time. We worked on it most of the afternoon and then the 3 of us drove to the next town over to get some burgers, fries and milkshakes at the little drive thru place. We worked on the puzzle again most of the evening, but I can tell evenings are not her good time for memory at all. She could not comprehend matching up what we had done with the puzzle so far with the picture on box. Finally I just said let's be done for tonight and we watched tv. Today she is doing good at it, but I also realized she needs to be in the seat directly in front of the puzzle, not to the side, in order to compare the puzzle with the box picture. We had switched seats at one point, so I had her switch back, then she did much better.
As the neighbors little grandsons say "one more sleeps". LOL.
I am thankful she has more than enough money to live in her senior apartment and will be able to afford assisted living. I would certainly have her here if she couldn't afford it, but boy, I can tell it would.
oh, and she needs some more cash. Not a big deal. But since we were waiting for her to get her DI card, in order to open a local bank acct. She doesn't have a debit/cash atm card with her Bank of America acct anymore (have no idea what happened to it, she hasn't had it for at least a few years) so she can't get cash out anywhere on her own right now. I just grab cash out of my atm/my account and she writes me a check back. Only this time I cannot seem to explain this to her! trying to keep it as simple of explanation as possible but it's not working. I think she is confused about where she lives, banks, how far away I am, etc.
I'm exhausted.
Oh, this is so familiar to me. The evenings, when the sun goes down is worse. The winters longer days are coming. I know it gets frustrating but hang in there. I'm sure she's enjoying her time with you.
ReplyDeleteThis is so sad for both of you. Is there a way to slow down the memory loss? Can a specialist prescribe a drug? My mom loved jigsaw puzzles. We all have framed puzzles that she made.
ReplyDeleteI read where someone put outdoor lights outside all the windows and kept porch lights on and kept her parent a bit more disoriented at night. That might be a good tactic. Of course, lights outside the windows where she would stay in the evenings would be all you needed. I am getting a light box, 10,000 lumens, so one of those in the room might help, too. And, her insurance would pay for it to try to mitigate the "Sundown" effect.
ReplyDeleteI am sorry. Having gone through it with Mom I know the sadness, frustration, worry, uncertainty that goes along with it .
ReplyDeleteWith Mom nothing would mitigate Sundowners, and we finally just had to accept the it was part of her being. We were fortunate plans were in place for her to have access to any and all funds needed for her care.
They've had tremendous success (in Holland I think) in adult communities with Alzheimers sufferers with surrounding them with "things" from the time of their relative youth. Like in the UK it would be the old red telephone boxes and stuff like that, because they remember what they were doing then, but not now. I don't know how you would recreate that, but the thing I took from my dad's illness was that we all had to pretend we were living in the 1950s/60s. Good luck!
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