Stardate 10/16/09

I am sitting here at the crack of dawn, actually it is 8:00am, but it feels like the crack of dawn, writing my post live. I can't begin to describe how good it feels to be back online again. Whether the internet is part of the devil's tool shop or not, most Americans are lost without it. Most Africans who have mastered it, find it a very helpful part of life too. I think it is one of those revolutionary things like the automobile and penicillin.
This morning I was rousted out of bed by big noises downstairs and Merry flying up the stairs to tell me Grandpa was up, crazy, in Grandma's clothes and was trying to go home. I came down and looked on the couch where he had collapsed and sure enough, he was dressed in Grandma's clothes and her winter coat and his baseball cap. He wasn't in much shape to go anywhere as he was breathing so laboriously. He was in really rough shape yesterday so I said "He might be trying to die." I am still waiting to see if that is what is up. He hasn't had a REALLY crazy spell in a long time, but yesterday I was sure we had numbered days left. However, he has had a fooled several times. We will think for sure that "this is it", then he will sleep hard and then he rises out of the ashes and he's his old self again.
Stop.
Start.
He is officially out of the ashes. Clothes are now changed. He is shaking way to much for comfort and is slurring, but he is wolfing down his 2nd bowl of cereal so I would say we are ok for now. In the meantime Grandma woke up and she needed to go to the bathroom....now!

Dealing with 2 dementia driven, late geriatric patients is quite a ballet dance sometimes. The difference between them and children is that the order is reversed. The milestones are not in achievements, but are in lost capabilities. Being able to accept that without anger, fear, frustration or being weirded out too much takes some skill. With my Granny, I just learned to separate myself from being attached to the person who I knew as a much younger, stronger woman. The trick is to understand what you are dealing with and not apply normal rules of rational to the person. If you allow yourself to be too emotional, you will lose it. The other huge difference between children and geriatric adults is that the egos are much larger in the old folks and learning to deal with that so confrontations are minimal is a skill all of it's own that can not be described. You just have to experiment and you learn through trial and error. Let me tell you, being on the receiving end of a dementia tyrade is pretty big incentive for finding non confrontational ways to deal with situations.

Eventually I will post a list of the meds we are using and how well they worked. I can tell you confidently that without the meds and without my adult daughters working part time, Matt and I would have had to give up because the work is just too hard and demanding.

Another thing that is a Godsend and something I never see in the traditional places like nursing homes are children's jigsaw puzzles. Lee likes the floor puzzles because the pieces are large enough for his arthritic fingers and his poor eye sight. 24-48 pieces are just about right because it can be done in 30 minutes to an hour. When we weren't on death's door and the memory was better, Trouble and Uno were big favorites. Now we are too far along for that, but in the early days we used them a lot.

Well I am going to end this post for today. It is now 12:30 and I am just finishing it. It is one of those days!