Alzheimer's is a killer disease - for the family. Is it harder on me because of my bipolar disorder? I'll probably never know.
Yesterday did not start out well. Sunday is the one day of the week I have to take care of Mom along all day. After she woke me up at 4:30 a.m., I tried to raise the roller shade over my windows, but pulled it too far down instead to the point where it can't be raised without being partially rewound. We're talking about a 10-foot wide shade on a 10.5 foot long roller here. So my room is in the dark until I can get assistance.
I gave Mom a hard-boiled egg from the fridge, some Ensure and a Nutri-Grain bar and went back to my room. Decided not to dress, just pulled on some sweat pants. In the process I brushed against a small decorative glass-topped table (the base is two dragons coiled around a castle) - and the whole top fell off. It hadn't come unscrewed, either - the screw-top of the base had broken off. It can't be fixed.
No, definitely not a good beginning to the day.
At some point I remembered what had happened the night before. I had been asleep maybe an hour and a half when the sound of Mom calling me had gradually penetrated. Once I would have leaped up; but months of having her call me every few minutes throughout the day have created a "boy who cried wolf" syndrome - it took me awhile to realize that she doesn't call during the night unless it's urgent. Although to be fair to me, she calls me during the day and evening so often that by now I hear her calling when she isn't - and I sometimes wake myself up having dreamed I heard her call.
I'd found her sitting on her bedroom floor, unhurt but unable to get up by herself. Her walker was tipped over, facing toward the bathroom. Her adult diaper was a soggy mess. I felt guilty. I gave her some more sleeping pills and we both went back to bed - until, as I said, she woke me at 4:30.
I never did get dressed properly, just went around in raggedy sweatpants and the ancient, threadbare T-shirt I'd slept in. (And I do mean ancient - I have two of these, and they were my fiancee Richard's before they were mine. Richard died in 1992.) What with my enormous pot-belly and my posture drooping with fatigue, I must have been a hell of a sight as I moved the lawn sprinkler around the yard every 45 minutes all day long.
(Oh yes, that's another thing - the man who installed my sprinkler system has never contacted me this spring, and his phone number is disconnected, so I have a useless $4,000 system and have to do all the watering myself. I'm trying to find a company that will take over the servicing of a system they didn't install.)
My original plan for yesterday had been to work as long as it took to catch up at least the accounting essentials for my day job. I think I have been to work one day in the last two or three weeks, and my bipolar depression has been so bad I've just let everything pile up. But on Saturday I had done several hours' work from home, and I really had a chance to get current - until I lost my connection to the server at the office.
Even then, I thought I could take Mom with me yesterday, go to the office and reset the software that allows me to connect from home. Ha. Not a chance. She went into her "I'm nauseated" routine and shuttled back and forth between her bed and her chair in front of the dining room's television for hours, calling me over and over to tell me she was going to throw up.
I have no idea whether the nausea is real. It may be. She has gallstones that could be starting to bother her. On the other hand, one evening when she called to me from her room and I asked her, when I got there, why she had called, I swear I saw her look around and focus on the bowl we give her to barf in (which she's never actually had to use) before saying, "I'm nauseated." That was definitely attention-seeking behavior.
These days she spends most of her time in bed. Her Alzheimer's has progressed to the point where she can't even follow a TV program any more, often asking what we are watching when the star of the series is on the screen. What she wants IS attention. "I'm lonesome." "I need you." "Tuck me in." "Can't you stay here with me?" Nohemi does stay with her most of the day; I won't, can't, do it during Nohemi's time off.
Anyway, balked of the ability to continue working for my paying job, did I turn around and make other good use of the time? Did I pay bills, start organizing my paperwork (piled up since the first of the year), or even plant? Oh no - like a kid let out of school, I went back to my computer game and spent the entire day and evening on it (when not moving the sprinkler and tending to Mom).
