All's Quiet on the Western Front

I haven't really posted anything here in a few months because, well, there really hasn't been anything to post. A lot of status quo. Ethel still talks in her sleep, and won't give up on waving at the weather girl, but she's not swatting at kitty-cats in the light fixtures or trying to feed invisible people in the corner of the room, so I suppose that's all good.

On the other hand, she's been getting progressively shorter on breath. She's had the oxygen machine for quite a while, but has resisted using it. She doesn't resist so much anymore. Getting half-winded going to the bathroom and back seems to be the tipping point.

Her perception of time hasn't ever really come back, though. Is it day, is it night, this doesn't look like breakfast ("because it isn't"), what day of the week is it ("It's Tuesday, why, are you going somewhere?")... I'm afraid I haven't been suffering these questions quite as cheerfully as I wish I always did. As no small surprise to anyone that knows me, there are days I can be a royal ass. My concerns for the world are aimed a little higher than answering again today, as the day before, and the day before that, "Dark means night, Grandma."

Sometimes that comes out instead as, "You're right next to a window all day long, can't you look outside and take a guess?"

Like I said, sometimes I'm an ass. Every once in a while I can duck down the road & visit some friends for the weekend, but I think what I really need is a vacation. From everything.

'Tis the Season

Ethel scowls at the morning news. "What the devil is this 'Black Friday' they keep talking about?" she asks.

"It's the day after Thanksgiving," I answer. "It's the day a lot of stores start running their big Christmas sales."

Still scowling. "Oh. That's news?"

"Nope. It just gives 'em something to make noise about instead of talking about things that matter."

Recovery

In celebration of Mother's Day, Sister and I took Mom and Ethel out to eat this past Saturday. The astute among you might have noticed that this precious moment is a week late, and those who personally know the furback would probably be more surprised if this were not the case.

Still, it turns out, this is exactly as planned. When I ran it past Mom, she opted to put it off a week so we weren't fighting crowds. This seemed like perfectly sound reasoning to me. That it played directly into my innate tendencies had nothing at all to do with my total acquiesce.

What do you mean, "Yeah, right?" Really, it didn't!

Anyway...

We went to the Shiny and New TGIFriday's in our area. The staff was excellent, the dinner delicious, and Sister's salad was completely hosed. OK, not everything was perfect, but the manager fixed the salad - and the bill - so no big deal as far as the meal goes.

It is a big deal, though, to get Ethel up, and dressed, and made up, and out of the door and loaded into the car and unloaded at the restaurant, all the while trying to keep her sightseeing in check. All of that takes a toll on energy levels, and on noone's more than her own. For an hour and a half out, she paid back the entire day Sunday sleeping it off.

Even at that, I'm glad that we can still take her out.

Here, Kitty Kitty

The fates, as if to taunt me for bothering to notice, send the visions back to Ethel. I walk in the back door last night to hear, "Here, Kitty Kitty! *tk tk tk*, come on, get down from there!"

The little black cat, it seems, was hiding in the shade of the ceiling light. Ethel was swatting at it with a back scratcher.

There is no cat.

I've been giving her one Seroquel in the evenings, I'm going to add a pill to the morning for a couple of days to see if that settles her back out. In the meantime, I'll keep an eye out for imaginary hairballs in my shoes.

Placid Waters

Sometime back, about 4 to 6 weeks ago, we added a new medication to Ethel's chemical cocktail. Since then, it's been mostly quiet times. The imaginary friends have all but stopped, as have the jerks. Oh, there's still the occasional moment of talking to the walls in a nearly-asleep haze, but the visions while wide awake and otherwise lucid haven't been there.

Here's to modern medicine.

Don't Pick It, You'll Only Make It Worse

There are scabs, and then there are scabs. Diabetics sometimes heal slower than normal folk. Old people heal slower than younger people. Injuries on certain parts of the body heal slower than other parts. Picking at it only makes it worse.

So when you have, say, a scalp abrasion on a 90-year-old diabetic scab picker, you have an injury that could potentially take a serious chunk of time to heal. And has.

Ethel is also a pack rat. Anything that has ever been thrown away has been done by someone else, usually out of prudence or desperation. Still, no matter how much sorting and weeding we do, she still has a near bottomless reserve of hiding places out of which she can draw the most bizarre stuff.

So it comes to be that, after picking the scab off -yet again - I find her, mystery tube of goop in hand, ready to apply it to her scalp.

"What the hell is that?" I ask in alarm, not recognizing it.

Something the doctor gave her years ago. 13 years ago, it expired in 19-by-God-97. And is (was?) an anti-fungal for Lord knows what, I don't know where it's been hiding since then but it's gone now.

"The doctor gave it to me, it must be OK to use," she protests. I have no idea which doctor, or even if he's still practicing this long after, but that doesn't matter to her. To her mind, one tube of salve is as good as any other, and even better if a Doctor said so. She won't get that they don't all have the same stuff in them.

I coated the spot with A&D instead.

They Call Him the Streak

I should probably explain that Ethel's name isn't really Ethel. To be fair, my given name isn't Dosquatch*, either, and amazingly Mom and Sister have actual names. I don't expect that anonymity can truly be maintained on the Internet, but I feel better for at least maintaining the prima facia pseudonyms. It's how the furback rolls.

Ethel's name is courtesy of Mom. Ethel has tendencies that evoke, in Mom's mind, certain Ray Stevens lyrics.

Ethel has a curious nature. Everything catches her attention. She's compelled by nature to stop every few steps and look at something, and that's at home. She can't keep track of the days of the week, but leave a trinket, bauble, widget, or piece of mail in a different spot and she'll lock in on it like a lion on its prey. She'll stand there, studying it, staring at it, and - if it's within arm's reach - she will handle it.

It's even worse when we're out, if for no other reason than because she'll do the same thing with small children. This is problematic. People are funny about their kids and strangers, even kindly old women.

Ethel came from an era where community was still community, and the children in the community were everybody's responsibility. The true "It Takes A Village" small town sort of thing. So it's natural to her to make faces and googly noises at babies and wiggle their feet. Babies like that sort of thing. It's just what you do - when it's your baby, or the baby of someone you know. She doesn't get that times have changed, though, and that you can't do that to random people's children without ruffling feathers. She watches the news, sure, and wonders how people can do such horrible things to kids, she just doesn't understand why this should impact her own behavior.

We try to minimize distraction, and to keep her focused on the task. "Don't look, Ethel!" Mom cries, but often, it really is too late. Easily distracted has been elevated to an art form.

* - though I will answer to it in conversation

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

"What are you doing in here?" Ethel yells out suddenly. "Wait, where you goin' now?" she follows.

I go to check on her - the new medication's been doing something at least. She's been sleeping through the night, and hasn't had any "visitors" in over a week, so this outburst gets my attention.

Her eyes are open, but they're full of that semi-vacant "just woke up" fog. Talking her way in and out of sleep is normal. For her, anyway, she's done this for as far back as I can remember. I sit down to chat for a bit.

"Where's who going?" I ask.

"The ball players. They come in here and pitch sometimes."

"In here? I don't know, do you think there's enough room?"

She chuckles, then sighs. "I don't know," she says. She looks at the television. The television is always on. Awake, asleep, somewhere in between, and she's very upset if it isn't. It's women's tennis.

"I don't like tennis," she says.

We talk about that a bit, and why she watches it if she doesn't like it. Nothing consequential, just chatter. She starts fading back into sleep again, and I slip back out to the living room. Nothing unusual. Just Saturday.

So Soon?

"I've got the jerks again," she informed me last night.

And how, she's shaking like a detuned Model-T. Sometimes they're worse than others, this seems to be a bad batch. It's not the severity that has my attention, though, as much as the timing. This round has come a lot sooner on the heels of the last round than typical.

She's only been taking the new med since Monday night. I don't know if that's soon enough to have an effect either way, but I'm keeping an eye on it.

I've said the spasms seem to accompany bouts of imaginary people, but they also seem to accompany blood sugar weirdness. The usual order is - her blood sugar will spike up to 170-180 for a couple of days, and then crash into the 70's for a day, then she'll shake, then she'll spend a couple of days seeing people.

Sometimes the order is different, sometimes symptoms show up at the same time. Sometimes one or another won't show. But they're all relates somehow, and usually, they're all lined up.

I Want a New Drug

It's Sunday morning. I'm listening to the coffee pot crack and gurgle its way to a full pot on one side, and Ethel on the other.

"Emmit?" she calls. "Emmit, what you doin' in there?"

I've muted the television so I can hear he better. "Did she ever get over there?" she asks. "I don't know something something something commode." And then she's snoring again.

It's like listening to one half of a telephone conversation. You think you're following along, and then you hear that one strange word or sentence, and suddenly you wonder if you've really been following at all.

---

My question to the neurologist, what is dementia, turns out not to have a straight-forward answer. The things that can be definitively ruled out, like stroke or Lewy plaques, have been ruled out with CT scans. A couple of other candidates have been ruled out because she does not possess symptoms or conditions required as part of a diagnosis.

What is left is probably, though not absolutely, Alzheimer's, and even if it were one of the other remaining possibilities, the treatment is still the same.

Since the hallucinations have been getting worse, we have a new pill - Seroquel. This is an anti-psychotic medication, with a shotgun-blast of treatable conditions, including schizophrenia, borderline personality disorders, bipolar disorders, autism, epilepsy... damn.

The doc says to ease her into it. Ah, well, time to crack out the pill cutter again.