A Day In The Life

It is often difficult to know what to report here for everyone to read. This week, I want to say that we have seen other symptoms of decline lately. Mom has always had a mind of her own, as you know, and she has had great difficulty adjusting and admitting that she is losing more and more control of her life along with the continuous decline in her cognitive abilities. She is exercising what control she does have by not interacting with Janice, refusing to eat the lunch that is prepared for her and getting ice cream, PB&J or cookies for herself. She has not been doing her crafts for more than a week and alternates between sleeping/lying in her bed, playing with the puppy until she gets too rambunctious, and sitting outside when it is nice. For me, she has refused to shower or eat dinner. We put the food in front of her and she feeds it to the dog or just leaves it. I got her to shower on Saturday by telling her I would not take her to church until she had showered.
Another odd thing happened on Wednesday morning. Joe and I were up around 5:15. He got in the shower and loved on the puppy for a few minutes before taking her outside. I heard Mom yell from her room via the baby monitor “that’s mine.” I did not think anything of it because she very frequently yells and talks in her sleep. As I went toward the front door to take Heidi out, Mom met me in the kitchen and turned the light on. She was obviously disturbed and went on about a boy who had just been in her room and stolen her boxes that were on the seat of her walker. She continued to insist that there had been boxes of her stuff there and the boy took them and if she caught him or saw him again she would kill him. My first tactic was to get her to remember that there were no boxes there, the house was locked, I was up and would have known if someone was in the house, the dogs did not bark, etc. It did not take long to adjust that tactic to say to her that I understood that she truly believed that this had happened; however, she was probably sleeping or hallucinating. I told her that she takes medication for hallucinations and that when I take her to the doctor next month, I would have to mention this episode to her. I told her that if she did not feel safe, that we could talk about that and see what we could do to help that. Mom totally and angrily dismissed me and crawled back in bed wrapped up in the covers like a cocoon. Nothing more has been said about it and I left her a note that morning with the job of boiling some chicken breasts for use later on. I warned Janice about the morning not knowing what Mom would be like when she got up. If she perseverated on it all day, she could get pretty worked up and Janice may have needed to call for help. As it turned out, Mom got up as usual, ignored Janice as usual and cooked the chicken breasts.
Mom refused to shower again last night. Today I left her a note requesting that she shred the chicken for salad. I will be home with her tomorrow because she sees the ophthalmologist in the morning. She wants to get some yarn to crochet. Maybe, maybe not…
The day in the life of a person with Alzheimer’s: Slipping away and helpless to stop it. I’ll be trying the shower thing again Saturday…