Around The World In 15 Minutes

We decided to use all four days off work over the Thanksgiving holiday to go to my hometown and celebrate the holiday w/ my family, do some serious deer hunting, and spend some time one of the four days spring cleaning my Grandmother’s house. That was the plan. Or should I say at least that WAS the plan. It sounded so good when we talked about it before we left for the holiday.
I picked up my Grandmother at her apartment on my way down there since Hubby and I took separate vehicles. Just like the last time, she was far from ready to go. As a matter of fact, I found her standing in an inch or so of water in her bathroom with the top of her pants down around her thighs. She was trying to rinse out a very dirty washcloth and had some how over flowed the sink resulting in the mini-flood. After some investigation, I found wads of toilet paper stuck all around the drain in the sink and that seem to be clogging the water from going downward. After 5 or so minutes of mopping I had most of the water gone and then wound up wiping down the toilet, sink and cabinet in the meantime… the mysterious brown splotches all over the bathroom were back even after I wiped them up just a couple of weeks ago.
I then discovered another huge wet spot in the middle of her bedroom floor in front of the dresser… only a couple of inches from the last one I found… and it was wet and again smelling like urine. I was baffled over this one… she has no idea about it when asked… I manage to inspect her person… she once again needs her garments changed and clean clothes. I clean her up and start looking for her “missing” underwear. (The staff informed me on my way in that she needed more underwear since hers were all missing). I start looking through all her drawers in the cabinet… none to be found. And then I opened her cedar chest… she must have crammed every stitch of clothing in that chest that was not hanging in the closet! I am sniffing every piece of clothing I pull out of there and putting anything that looked or smelled remotely dirty into a pile and hanging up the rest in the closet. I must have found 10 pair of soiled underwear just crammed into the bottom up under everything else! It was awful. She must have been hiding them every time she messed on herself. I wound up with a big bag of laundry to wash today, get her dressed, and take off for turkey dinner at my Mom’s.
This day with my Grandmother proved to be a multitude of “trips around the world in 15 minutes” as I call them. Why do you ask? Because her mind was ALL over the place! She asked me several times before we even got to my Mom’s if I had any children. Huh?
The thing is that she tends to nod off to sleep almost every time she is sitting down and has not conversed with someone or is not moving around… and then she dozes off…and when she wake up… Bam! Her brain starts all over again… one time she jumped up and exclaimed, “This is not my house! Who are you?” to me and my Mom… Another time she was sitting in the recliner dozing and then all of a sudden she just starts crying out loud as if on cue…when I ask her what is wrong she starts rambling on about how I won’t buy her any thing or how she never gets to go any where. A few minutes later and she is back dozing and we start all over again. She asked several times about “where is that little girl?”… and we have NO clue as to who she is talking about! You ask who she is looking for and she gets angry so fast…it was such a long, burdening day for me that guiltily I just had to get her out of there towards mid-afternoon. I felt so guilty to take her back to her apartment but the many trips around her brain (the world) just about killed us that day. On top of dealing with her mind, I also hand scrubbed ten pair of soiled underwear, one pair of pants and several socks… all before we even ate Thanksgiving dinner! She ate the entire meal with her fingers again… the fork is just not comprehendible to her anymore… she seems to mumble a lot more these days… so quietly though I find myself constantly saying to her, “Huh? What did you say?”… After twenty times of asking that throughout the day, I had had enough. I left her at her apartment with all clean laundry shortly before her suppertime.
Of course, the hot topic of the night once I returned to my Mom’s was her behavior. I bounced theories and ideas off my Mom… it is always the never-ending question, “What am I going to do?” And the answer is always out of my reach…
Hubby and I got up really early the next morning to go deer hunting. I was climbing a very high stand in the pitch dark around 6:30am… I, for one, am not a fan of walking through the woods in the dark at that time in the morning… especially in unfamiliar territory. Hubby made sure I got all the way up into the very tiny, very rickety, swivel one-seater stand. I had been in the stand about 30 minutes when the phone call came in… just as dark was turning to light… that moment at dawn when the woods are really quiet… and then the buzzing of the cell phone broke the silence… the caller ID showed the assisted living center’s main number…I am thinking, “are you kidding me?”… I answer very, very quiet, “hello” and a voice on the other end tells me that my Grandmother has fallen and they think she has broken her arm… “Seriously?”… Yes, we think she needs to go to the ER…. Needless to say, I was stranded on someone’s land with no vehicle and there was no way I could get there quick enough to escort her to the ER… so I calledd my Mom, woke her up and asked her to go check it out….
Well to make a long story short, I met them at the ER just after the X-rays were taken and the Doctor tells us that she has broken her shoulder. She, of course, has no clue and does not remember that she is in pain until she moves the arm a certain way. They send us away with a sling and pain meds… and orders to call and set up an appointment with the Orthopedic Doctor the following week. We get back to the apartment and I realize that she cannot be by herself since she now has one arm only. I wound up hiring one of the ladies that works there to sit with her at night to help her dress, undress, bathe, go to the bathroom, eat, etc. In the meantime, we have managed to successfully move her into adult “pull-ups” to help with her “potty issues”… so far this has been the only thing that has worked out since that day. The sitter has discovered that the wet spots on the floor in the bedroom are from her urinating in front of the dresser in the middle of the night instead of the bathroom. She wakes up, gets out of bed, walks over to the dresser, squats and pees… isn’t that something? How do you teach an old dog a new trick? Like how to use the pull-ups instead for crying out loud! I am baffled more and more with every passing day.
On Monday, the new director of the assisted living center confronts me about hiring a sitter without using their in-house program (which would cost us double the hourly rate by the way)… I tell her it was a 4-day holiday and they would not be back for 3 days and I needed a sitter THEN. She tells me that the Owner is upset and that the sitter will have to be reprimanded… I politely reiterate my case again. After several rounds of this, she finally agrees to turn their head this time… but, no more after this one time. I am again baffled… I already have enough on me with the shoulder and incontinence issues- please just throw another burden onto me!
Then, I found out that my Grandmother’s sister has called my Mother and informed her that she will no longer be able to take her to get her weekly hair appointments since the beautician will not work on her with a broken shoulder… Huh? Turns out that her sister was just using this as an excuse to get out of her commitment to my Grandmother… Great, another issue to deal with! Another ball of fire! I call on my Father to see if he will help with getting her to the hair appointments… he steps up to the plate. The balls of fire and torture keep flying at me and keep dodging them…
I take a half day off the following Thursday to take her to the Ortho Doctor… he tells us that her shoulder is not broken after all! Relief all around…just bruised and lots of arthritis…
I pay the sitter that afternoon… whew, not a light fee… but, worth her safety…. To this day the sitter is still there… have not decided when to stop having her there as a safety net… the fear of her falling again or peeing a river in her bedroom frightens me daily into keeping the sitter… again, what AM I going to do?