Wild Days and Nights with Lewy and Jo

Mom's sleep cycles are reversed

Mom has been in the home a month and 2 days.  She has good days and not so good days; sleep contributes to her good days.

Lately, she has not been sleeping at night.  Insomnia has taken hold of her again, leaving her exhausted and in a state of total confusion.  We think she may have another UTI, too.

Talking to the air, "Where's Eddie?"

"Come here, come on."  She will say as she snaps her fingers, pointing to a corner of the room.

"The little boy.  He's over there.  See him.  Tell him to come here." My mom demanded yesterday when I visited.

Wild with her eyes closed, talking and talking to someone that only she could see in her mind; vivid hallucinations became her reality.

Walking with her yesterday, it was difficult to get her to maneuver her walker.  She forgot how to use it.  Mom was over tired, she needs to sleep at night.

I am not keen on giving her drugs to knock her out at night; the drugs take her deeper into the between world.  She becomes a vegetable; tongue sticking out, slumped in her chair, unable to speak, walk and feed herself.  It's hard to see her like this; I insist on no drugs.

Mom's nurse, God love her, thought she'd walk my mom to the toilet yesterday when she saw her fidgeting in her chair.  Mom thought the chair was the toilet.  She began pulling her pants down as she walked and tried to sit on the chair to poo.

"Oh my God, Sue!  How did you do it by yourself?"  Georgia the nurse said to me as I walked in yesterday morning to visit my mom.  It took two of them to get my mom on the REAL toilet.

I remembered the feeling of stress that I experienced every day over my mom and her poo.  A sick pit in my stomach accompanied the flood of memories while my only reply was, "Thank God she's here."

My mom is walking.  She is feeding herself.  She has good days where she believes that she's WINNING and then she has days where she's looking for my dead brother Ed or trying to poo on a chair.