Big Finish!

Wooo!! It's Christmas!!!

I am draining the hourglass, so to speak, on my holiday duties. The big finish was Christmas.

In the perspective of a person with Alzheimer's there is only the now. It doesn't matter that I spent the previous two days helping my mom see her loved ones. There was only the fact that it is Christmas and we were not doing anything fun. And she hadn't slept much the night before, so I arrived to find her grumpy and disoriented.

It was not a good day for anyone. I counted the hours. She spoke gibberish and was angry for a bunch of the day. I learned what a lot of her distressing behaviors look like in person and most do not scare me.

But there were things I'd never seen: trying to use a napkin as a spoon; trying to eat a napkin; spitting a cough drop into a tissue box...

Then there was the over the top stuff. She refused to let anyone change her underwear for the whole day. I kept watching the bulge in her pants grow, and along with it my concern. She has significant discomfort from rashes which are worsened by her sitting in wet pants. She insisted that she was fine and could use the restroom herself, but can't actually stand without assistance. So how is the going to the bathroom going to work? Or getting into bed from the wheelchair? Or getting into a car?

Mom registered her displeasure in a number of ways. She refused her meals. She cried "How can you do this to me" a bunch of times. She tried to break her own finger (ok THAT really freaked me out). She tried to eat a figurine. And she basically *seethed* all day. At one point I just aimed her wheelchair to a place where she could look out the window and not see me. I set the brake so she couldn't move. Then I passed the time by sweeping the floor, dusting, and polishing her furniture with diaper rash ointment. 

We talked to my siblings on the computer. At least that was kinda nice. Mom didn't care, and there was a lot of gibberish that I couldn't translate, but it made the moments pass uneventfully. Eventually I brought out...the balls.

Mom's been aggressive lately, so I bought some soft Nerf-type balls that I thought we could make a game with. I brought them to her apartment with a hat box, figuring that we could use it as a basket and get out some of that aggressive energy and convert it to fun. I pointed her into the hallway in her apartment and tossed her some balls to toss into the hatbox. She thought I was crazy. Eventually she started threatening to hit me with the soft balls and I asked her to go ahead. She said that she wanted me to hurt the way that she hurts. 

"How can you do this to me?" 

"You've turned into something horrible" 

"You are a sexpot"

"If you were in the bed with me I'd kill you" 

and my personal favorite:

"You just want me dead so that you can go in the fields and fuck boys". She seemed additionally hurt that I wasn't hurt by the awful stuff she was saying to me. As if the fact that she couldn't hurt me meant I did not love her. At one point I wanted to say "I'm on drugs, and they pretty much prevent me from crying, so do your best". And when she said that she was never going to see me again I said "Great!" She was not really selling the idea of why I'd want to see her again, but you can't convince a person with dementia of anything.

But then there were the shrieks. I have rarely heard the kinds of shrieks she emitted when the helpers in Memory Care finally got her dirty Depends off of her. But when another helper and I got her into bed? Those shrieks were even worse. You would have thought that the Devil himself had slid a hot poker up her butt. After we got her in bed, however, it wasn't long before the Beast slept for a bit. And then my sweet mom returned for a few moments. And not long after that I ran away to eat dinner with mrguy.

We found a Chinese restaurant that was open after 8pm. Let's call it Zorba's Szechuan. The food was great but it was after 8pm and they were slamming all of the dishes around as they cleared the tables, and then they broke a bunch for good measure. Our ears were ringing, but we were fed.

Merry Christmas. Is it over yet?