What's the world coming to...?

There is a 4 year old who lives two doors down from us who is just adorable. She has long hair and is always in a dress and always has her fingernails and toenails painted to match. She's very outgoing and always comes up to the door when she sees Mom or I on the porch. She is very bright and very articulate for a 4 year old. And she can be kind of demanding, at times. She demands to come in, she demands to see the dogs, she opens doors on her own and one day the neighbors came home to find her in their house and half way up the stairs!

We affectionately refer to her as the "spawn of satan".

Mom loves kids and animals. That said, I was afraid this kid would come up sometime when I'm not around and come in and accidentally let the dogs out. If the dogs got out, Mom would naturally try and chase addie down (to no avail, I'm sure) and get lost in the process. Not only that, the other day the little spawn came riding down the street on her tricycle with a kitten in her basket. Well, that was all Mom needed to run out the front door and coo all over her and that kitten. And pretty soon she was off and down the street with the kid and the kitten. I kept an eye on her to make sure she made it back home. So, I decided to let this kid in the house a couple of times. She is so demanding and overbearing, that even Mom noticed, and was alarmed by it. And that is exactly what I wanted to happen. I let her in and she ran through the house and wanted to see this and that and Mom watched her going 100 mph and when I made her leave, fianlly, she demanded to be able to stay. I don't think anyone has ever been stern with her, which is probably why she is like she is...so I mustard up the 'mean' look and told her, in no uncertain terms, that if she was ever going to come over here again, she was going to play by MY rules. She is never allowed to open any doors or gates without me being there, she had to LISTEN (we have to go over that one a lot--every time she's here), and no cussing. Yep, belive it or not, that is a biggie. She hasn't done any of it at my house, but I was talking to her Mom one day in their yard and she called her own Mom an MF...only she said the whole two words. Wow. And she'll flip people off. Mostly older kids. I don't let her see me laugh, but that is quite funny, to see that tiny, chubby middle finger pop up when some older kid tells her to go home. Suprisingly, she understood the rules at my house, but Mom has seen enough, I think. lol. When she sees her coming down the street on her tricycle, Mom will go in the house and close the door.

She did that very thing one day and I said, "Mom, what's the world coming to when we have to barricade our doors from a 4 year old?"

She laughed. And agreed.

A victim of Vioxx...?

My Mother tells anyone who will listen that my Dad, her husband, was a victim of Vioxx. It's not true, but I am personally to blame for her believing this. What my Dad was a victim of was mostly his own fault. He smoked for 60 + years and couldn't put them down. Not after his first heart attack, not after his second open-heart surgery, not after they told him it would kill him. When he died, his heart probably looked like a black jelly bean. What they told him was that his heart would never be able to survive any surgery, ever again. And here's what happened...

Two years before he died he developed an aortic aneurism. They couldn't operate then because his heart would never be able to come back from it. So, because of the pain it caused him, he started taking vicodin. Eventually, his surgeon called him in and told him about a new procedure that he would be a candidate for and it was successful. But he was addicted to the vicodin by then. The entire time he took it he had trouble with his bowel movements. He couldn't go. At one point it got so bad he tried to dig out his own stool with his fingers. It was awful. I told him the vicodin was doing that to him and he said he knew it and that he knew he should get off of them but at that point he couldn't. He had a family doctor at the time that just kept writing those scripts. He lost a ton of weight and couldn't eat. Finally, I made him go to the hospital. In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have. And if I knew then what I now know, I wouldn't have made him go. He would have died in his own bed within 24 to 48 hours. His bowel was impacted (I personally, am sure it was from the vicodin) and they told him then: Sugery, or wait it out (which meant certain death).  Long story, short...he opted for surgery, and lived about a week longer.

All of this was before Mom's diagnosis of Alzheimer's. A couple of months after he died, Mom was lamenting over what killed him and (stupid me) I told her I thought his Doctor over-prescribed the vocodin (and it was over prescribed, whether it killed him or not). I explained to her that it bound him up to the point that it caused the impaction. Well, she got things turned around and started seeing all of those commercialsabout getting on the lawsuit if you had a loved one who died from Vioxx...completely different drug! And that was all it took.

Every time she starts to talk about him now, it's always the same thing..."that damn vioxx killed him." She'll tell someone that he smoked non-filtered cigarettes for 40 years, before switching to filtered, but that ain't what killed him. It was that damn vioxx.

We had some friends over on Saturday afternoon and Mom was telling the story about how she and Dad met. Its a cool story and they enjoyed it. Then she said, "but he didn't live long after that...he was a victim of the Vioxx scandal." Now, there was a new one on me...now it was a scandal and he didn't seem to live much longer after they met. Later, when Mom wasn't around, my friend asked me, "So how old was your Dad when he died?"

I assured her that he did live longer than Mom made it sound.  They were married for just over 49 years. But I'm sure that to her, it wasn't long enough.

Leaving Mom alone...

     It never ceases to amaze me, the things Mom remembers. Oh, she still knows the basics...husband's name and the fact that he's no longer with us, that she has 6 kids and can remember all of their names, and that she has a bunch of grandkids (although she will ask how many anytime the subject comes up). If I mention a grandchild's name, she knows exactly who I'm talking about, but if I show her a picture of one of them she may or may not be able to tell me which one it is. She tends to recognize the older ones easier than the younger ones, which makes sense. Other than that, her memory is pretty well limited to things that happened 50 years ago. However I've noticed that she will most likely remember the stuff that stresses her out...

Saturday morning I was doing laundry and she wanted to help me fold clothes. So we dumped them all out on her bed and proceeded to fold them. I took all of ours upstairs and she put her stack away in the drawers and closet. While we were folding clothes I told her that Stan and I were going to go to the track and watch qualifications that afternoon.  I'd never been to THE track in May, so we were going with some friends. In the next 3 or 4 hours before we left, she asked us 100 times about when we were leaving, when we'd be back, how long would we be gone, etc. She doesn't need 24/7 care, but we also don't usually leave her alone for more than a couple of hours at a time. And the neighbors were going to be home all day. I had talked to them the day before and they said they'd be around and check on her. And the 100 questions was the reason I didn't tell her sooner we were going to be gone. I knew the questions would come.

They started during breakfast. "How long are you going to be gone, today?" "What if someone calls?" When are you leaving?" What time will you be back?" What should I do while you're gone?" "What do I do if that little girl comes over?" (4 year old down the street). There were really only about 6 or 7 questions but she asked each of them about 5 times. I realized that she was a nervous wreck about being alone but she thought we were going to be gone all day.  I realized then that we should have just told her we were running errands. She's always ok with that.

So, we were all sitting on the porch, waiting for our friends to show up and she started a new line of questioning.  "When am I going to Mike and Sue's?" (she stays with them half the year).

I said, "Why, are you ready to go to Mike and Sue's?"

"No. Not necessarily, I just wondered. Someone said they were coming up to get me later. I just thought it was today."

My brother and I hadn't nailed down any plans for the switch yet, so I told her, "Mom, you're probably going to be here for at least 6 more weeks, maybe two months. Is that ok?"  She assured me that it was.

Then she said, "then why did someone have all my clothes out on my bed this morning? Like I was going somewhere?"

I reminded her then, "Mom, you and I were just folding the clothes on your bed, remember?"  And then I asked her, "you didn't pack your bags, did you?"

"Nope. Don't know where they are."

We went to the track and walked around a little while and took in all of the sights and sounds and smells that are the epitome of the Indianapolis 500 track during the month of May. I picked up a stuffed bear for Mom for Mother's Day (which she loved). And we were back by 4 pm. She was fine. The neighbors stopped over for a little bit to talk with her and she worked on her puzzle and kept the dogs company, which is her favorite thing to do, anyway.

Mom's from the planet Ewe Tic Ah

My Mother's memories consist mostly of things that happened 40+ years ago. Rarely does she talk about something that happened in the past 20 years. And actually, if she tells any story that doesn't involve her childhood, I tend to listen a little more carefully. She has a few more recent memories that she'll tell quite often, but for the most part they all involve "back home".  When she uses the words 'back home', or refers to her home in any way, she is not talking about her home that we moved her out of. She isn't talking about any home she ever shared with my Dad through the almost 50 years they were married. She is referrring to her childhood home. It's not that she doesn't remember Dad, her husband. She does, and will talk about him frequently. She just doesn't seem to remember much about where they lived. She'll see something in my house that came from her house and automatically say, "oh, that was gramma's." And I always let it go.

She'll talk about her hometown like it's another planet. Her grandmother raised her in a small town in Ohio called Utica. These days, when she brings it up, which is daily, she'll say it in such a way that she makes it SOUND like another planet. She'll say it like it's six different words. Ewe Tic Ah, Oh High Oh. I don't know where she picked up that habit, but it's getting a little weird. And everything in Ewe Tic Ah is still the way it was 60 years ago. She's sure of it. (actually, she may be right about that one--it IS a small town). But she really hasn't been there in years. Whenever she sees anything out of her ordinary, she'll comment that they don't have such things where she's from. It could be a city bus, or we could be at the nursery looking at plants. If she sees something that she isn't familiar with, its always the same thing. "We don't have anything like that where I'm from."  She get so upset when she reads something in the paper about a rape or murder...and then she's right...they really didn't have anything like that where she's from.

Beam me up, Scotty.

A Family Loss

When my nephew called to tell his Grandmother she was getting a new Great grandchild, she started a baby blanket. She's been making squares to join together. And because she's making the blanket, she's able to remember that there is a new baby on the way and most of the time remembered it was Richard's. But some of the time she had to ask who it was having a baby. 

Yesterday I got an e-mail from my brother saying that my nephew's girlfriend lost the baby. She's ok, but they are both heart broken, I'm sure. I had to tell Mom and she was also heart broken. She worried about Richard all day and even told Stan about it when he got home from work. It also got her to thinking about the ones she lost. She'd lost three out of her 9 pregnancies. She talked about them off and on all that day and said she often wondered what they would have looked like or been like. This is one of those memories that she never brings up. When she talked about that I hung on every word.

All help appreciated!

Every morning I walk out to the pond with my coffee and say the Serenity prayer and ask God to help me to make the right decisions where Mom is concerned and then I ask Dad if he's around, to help me out, too. All help appreciated.

We took Mom to a fish fry tonight. They have a big one every Friday close by us and they have live music and have about 100 picnic tables. They pack 'em in every Friday.  The music is usually easy-listening. Mom really enjoyed it. She was toe-tapping and singing through dinner. Then we went to Pottery Barn and looked around.  When we're out she'll pick up the oddest things she wants to buy. If you've never been in a Pottery Barn, they have everything that the country of Taiwan has ever made. And of all of the things she saw, the thing she wanted to buy was a broken bowl...she liked it. I managed to convince her it wasn't all there, the lid was gone. 

I know I said I hate to shop but we try and make a trip to the Pottery Barn about once a year. It's actually Stan's favorite store, next to Home Depot.

We came back home and sat next to the pond for a while. I told Mom the pond was her Mother's Day present. I said, "Mom, you can just have that for Mother's Day." Pretty chintzy, huh? But she loved that I gave it to her and she said, "that's the sweetest gesture."  OK--I did get her a card and a book, too. She can't retain anything much that she reads anymore, but she does still read and she'll read every night before she goes to bed. It puts her to sleep. And I got her an easy read.

Every night, before she goes off to bed she gives us both kisses and always says the same thing: "Thank you for another wonderful day." She says it whether we've been running all day or sitting around the house all day, matters not to her.

I thank her back.

It ain't always easy

After having such a good day at the zoo the other day, we kind of had a crash and burn the day after. Mom can be so funny at times and at times I want to lock myself in my room. It rained most of the day on Wednesday and we couldn't get out in the yard. Moms shoulder started bothering her. Her left shoulder had bothered her for a long time and I finally called the orthopedic surgeon who had done my shoulder surgery and he gave her a shot of cortisone and she hasn't said anything about it since. All of the sudden now it's her right shoulder and she's acting like I'm personally to blame. She'll reach for something and tweak it and boy, it's like someone is cutting her arm off with a dull blade. She'll writh around in pain for a few minutes and I'll get her to sit down and give her an advil. Then she looks at me like I'm not doing enough. She has no recollection of ever seeing a doctor and I'm thinking that she thinks she's had this same pain for months.  I think she wants me to call 911. Seriously. So the other day we went through all of this and she says, "I need to see a doctor when I get to Sue's."

Sue is my sister-in-law and that is where Mom spends half the year, at a few month intervals. Sue and I are at completely different ends of the spectrum in terms of personality. She loves to shop and I'd rather eat a bug than go shopping. She's bubbling over with enthusiasm all the time...she's great with Mom and Mom loves her. Mom loves me, too, but I'm more on the laid-back side. If I have to go shopping I'd rather go straight in, pick it up, and straight back out. And I really try and get it done without taking Mom. Sue tends to take Mom along more often than I do.  I (or we) do try and get her out of the house 2 or 3 times a week, though. But rarely for shopping. lol. If you've read my earlier posts, I also took her to a new MD about a month ago, or so, and it was a total disaster.

So, when she said she needed to see a doc when she got to Sue's, I said, "why do you need to wait until you get to Sue's?"

"Because I don't want to bother you." She didn't just SAY it, she was kind of snippy about it.

So I said, "What makes you think you're bothering me, but you're not bothering Sue? I don't think that was very nice and I'm offended." This is where my emotion took control over my common sense. For a moment I thought she was my old Mom. For a moment I thought she spoke with malice on purpose and I forgot that it was the AD. And for a moment I was snippy right back.

She said, "well, I'm in so much pain I don't know what I'm even saying."

I went to my room for about an hour just to get away. And really I didn't want to get away from her but from myself. I was so mad at myself for snapping.  One thing about it...I'm still beating myself up for being hateful to her and she'd forgotten all about it 10 minutes after it happened.