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A Caregiver’s Odyssey – Part Two

March 30, 2012, Friday, Day 30 ~ 30-Day Blogging Challenge prompt is SERIAL EXPERIENCE - Describe a life experience so important to you it deserves to be told over multiple entries. MIDDLE a.k.a Part Two.

My mother cannot tell the difference between a dream (the kind you have at night) and reality. If Mom has a dream and wakes up, she believes that the events in the dream really happened. She believes that the evens in the dream just happened and she wants to continue doing whatever she was doing in the dream.

There was the dream about the man in the middle booth. For most of my mother’s adult life, she worked as a food server. In Blackwell, Oklahoma, she worked at Bob’s Grill and in Las Vegas, Nevada; she worked at the Showboat Hotel and Casino. I am not precisely sure in which one of those locations the events in this dream occurred. What I do know, is that I woke up hearing Mom call my name because she did not know where she was and she needed help getting out of bed.

When I got into the bedroom, she was sitting on the side of the bed. She wanted to get up because she had to serve finish serving the man in the middle booth. I got her up and convinced her to use her walker, then we walked through the house looking for the restaurant coffee shop where the middle booth was located. I even opened the front door to show her that we were not in a restaurant, but she still insisted that she had to serve the man in the middle booth.

I finally convinced her to go back to bed, but she was angry with me for the rest of the night because she thought that I had gotten or would get her fired. I have gotten used to Mom waking up in the middle of the night wondering what happened to the people who were just in the house or some other dream that she thought was real.

Mom has woken up demanding to know where her husband had gone (in this case, I presume she was talking about my father). I told her that his boss had called him in early because someone did not show up. She accepted that explanation and went back to sleep without a problem. The next morning she had forgotten the dream, she always forgets the dream. That is the one advantage of her short-term memory issues; she does not remember having the dream that cause her so much anger or frustration.

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