Do You Have All of Your Marbles?

Most of the time, my mom has no idea who I am.  It is confusing to her on so many levels.  Sometimes, for brief moments, she recognizes me and then laughs that she thought I was someone else.

Tonight, she was confused, she asked me if I had a license to be her nurse.  She asked me if I had a birth certificate to prove that I am her daughter.  She wants to see the birth certificates of all of her children.  Tomorrow, I told her that I'll pull them out of the safe and show them to her.

She asked me about my dead brother Ed, "where is he?" she said to me.  I look at her puzzled and then she started to laugh as she said, "Oh, he's down the well." 

She is confused about who I am more often than not.  She loves the me that's her nurse, she loves Nurse Sue.  As Nurse Sue, I call her Josephine and I talk to her like a nurse would talk to a patient; like I used to talk to Aggie, the woman I caregave to just before I bought my house and moved my mom in with me in 1998. 

It's better when she thinks I'm her nurse.

Sue visits, her daughter Sue.  Sometimes she thinks I'm Donna.  She knows Ann is in Maine, far away.  Marty?  She's always asking me where's Marty.

Today, she had visitors again.  The little boy was back.  Her sister Florence, who she reminded me her first name was Victoria, came today and visited.  My mom is slipping.  She's declining. 

I gave her Helleborus to see if we could chase the hallucinations away.

She will bounce back, she always does but she won't be at the place where she was before the mental slip.  I wonder if there's a natural remedy or homeopathic remedy that will help where Helleborus seems to be losing ground? 

Lewy Bodies Dementia is a strange disease. 

From what I've read on the LBD usergroup postings, this is something that just happens, the patient has setbacks and they don't go back to the sort of good days they had before the set back.  They still have good days, more of them, but they are different.  It requires more work for the Care Giver.  The patient believes they are doing great, while the Care Giver is asking the question to themselves, "Really?!"

Will we ever be ready for the next Lewy Bodies Phase?

My mom, she's starting to get the Lewy Body Lean.  She's leaning to the left.  I wonder if it's because she's been a life long Democrat that she's leaning left.  Leaning left works out in a healthful way too, because the left side is the side to lay on if you are constipated, it gives gravity a chance to work with your body.

All of this is amusing to me, my mom's confusion.  Just earlier today my mom was talking about the new Senior Center that she went to this week.  She told me that they were "unorganized."  I said, "In what way?"  Then she went on to tell me how the folks there don't have their "marbles." 

I asked her, "What do you mean?"

She said, "Well, we played the Price Is Right on Wii (we have that game and it's my mom's favorite TV Show, she never misses it) their was one guy who got mad, he doesn't have all his marbles.  He thought he really won the money on the Wii game, he was crazy.  I wanted to laugh out loud"  she said to me, "but, I just held it in.  These people were funny, they thought they were going to win real money."

My mom, it's really hard to describe how she is.  She seems to be in limbo most of the time.  She has good days.  I consider a good day to be a day without a hallucination.  Helleborus works for her but it takes more lately to get her to be more in life's realm of reality.

She sleeps through the night on her herbal remedies.  I really couldn't ask for much more.  My personal life is slowly coming back to me.  Time away from my duties as a Care Giver, time to just be with myself; it was better than any sedative prescribed by a doctor. 

This week, I had a taste of freedom, I was liberated from Caregiving, even if it was just for 5 hours, but it is 5 hours where I felt that I had all of my marbles!