Friday, August 4, 1995

For two weeks everything has been almost perfect--except for some daytime confusing and "getting lost" right here at home. My mother has slept well every night. One night she woke only twice for going to the bathroom! But tonight is another story.

She was all worn out and wanted to go to bed at 6:00 p.m. after a day of being rather hyper and not doing much of her daytime napping. She's been trying to get up since 9:00 p.m. Every time it was a different question: "Why are we in a place like this?", "Why are all these people here?", "Why are you here? Who invited you here?, Don't you have some other place to stay?" She was hungry, so I gave her a snack. Now at 11:30 p.m., she's sitting in her chair, wide awake but silent, not appearing to hear or understand anything I say to her. It looks like we will be up all night.

Saturday, August 5, 1995

Thankfully, my mother went back to bed last night at midnight and went to sleep. But it took me a long time to get back to sleep. She was up again at 4:00 a.m., up and down and wandering all over the house, talking about some man wanting her money. At 5:00 a.m. she sat in her chair and I fixed breakfast.

We're up again tonight. It started the same way, with my mother wanting to go to bed as soon as my sister left from her afternoon visit, and before we'd had supper. I rushed supper up and got her there by 6:00 p.m. But she kept getting up from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., using the bathroom and talking excitedly about some kind of plans she was making, some kind of work that had to be done that she was letting me do. At 9:30 she got up, saying "he" is here and that the work "must be done now." Now at 9:40, she's fallen asleep in her chair.

Thursday, August 17, 1995

Things have been going pretty well till the last three nights. My mother has been just sitting on the side of the bed, not getting back in in bed or going anywhere else. Last night she sat there, and at midnight she told me to get out of bed and fix her something to eat.

On Tuesday night she kept sitting up, and at 1:00 a.m., I got the big wedge pillow that I bought for her and suggested she prop herself up on it, and maybe she could still go to sleep that way. I lay back down and watched her. I dozed a little as I watched, but I don't think she slept much herself from 1:00 a.m. until 3:00 a.m. Then she lay back down and slept until 7:00 a.m. We really got lucky that time!

But not this time. My mother was up and down from 11:00 p.m. until midnight when she ordered me to get up and fix her something to eat. She said "None of ya'll don't ever fix me anything to eat."

After she ate, she calmed down. She leaned against the big wedge pillow for a couple of hours, but again, I don't think she slept much until she laid back down at 2:00 a.m. But I'm not lucky like yesterday--we're up now at 4:00 a.m.--to stay it seems.

Tuesday, September 5, 1995

Again, I haven't written in here in a while, not because there's been no problems, but perhaps because I was too busy attempting to solve them and just too tired to write anything down. I had also lost my journal. I'm getting really bad about losing things under my piles of mail and books.

Though my mother is sleeping for longer periods of time at night usually, it still seems she is getting up more confused and wanders through the house at all hours of the night. I've found out most often all she really needs to do is to use the bathroom, but getting her there is a major task. Often she is just fine as soon as she's made the bathroom visit, and she just crawls back in bed. But until she does it, she is often hysterical.

At 3:00 a.m. this morning she wandered through the house several times, talking on and on but saying hardly anything I could understand. There was a sense of urgency, and she was upset about something she was looking for or something that had to be done. Finaly I got her to go back to bed at 4:15, only to get right back up again. This time I got her to sit on her potty, though she got very angry at me. But as soon as she had used it she was calm, and she crawled back in bed and slept peacefully until 6:00 a.m.

It's getting to be this way every night lately. Always the same thing--she just needs to use the bathroom but doesn't know it. She doesn't understand what I'm saying when I tell her so. She gets angry, and her anger grows until we finally have a bathroom visit.

During the day, any little noise from the kitchen will make her angry sometimes. If I drop something, I'm really in trouble. Sometimes if I even touch her, just to help her up from her chair to go to the bathroom or to the table at mealtimes, I'm in trouble. Either my hands are too cold or I've hurt a sore place on her arm.

Sometime in the past couple of weeks I passed the one year mark. I have been taking care of my mother for a year now. I don't know how much longer I can go on. And yet, I've invested so much into taking care of my mother, and it is my life now-- I have no other life to go back to. So how can I give up now?

Sunday, September 17, 1995

I'm nearly a month into the second year with my mother, and I'm so afraid this is the end, not the beginning of another year.

My mother's confusion and her hallucinations and delusions are growing worse all the time. Just in the past two weeks, it has seemed that she's had a total break with reality--not just some of the time or much of the time, but all of the time. Not only does she not recognize any of us as her children, but she doesn't think she has ever had children. Nor does she think she's ever been married, and she doesn't even recognize the name when her late husband, my father, is mentioned.

We used to have bad times and good times both, but now it's mostly just bad times. There's no longer a time when things are better. Her bad reactions are no longer caused by something I can figure out, because now they always seem to be reactions to her dreams, hallucinations, and delusions and to the fact that I don't know what to do about them to make things alright for her. Always there's something she thinks has to be done immediatly, but usually she can't communicate well enough to let me know what needs to be done. How can I go along with what she wants or what she thinks when I don't know what it is?