The Wanderer

I can't say how many times I would get up during the night or early morning hours, look over at mom's house and see lights on, not just in her bedroom, but in the front room too. One time, my husband happen to be getting back late in the evening, and saw her kitchen light on. he went to check on her and she ws getting ready to eat breakfast, at midnight!

Day and night, night and day, it all blended together for her most of the time.
with no one here to schedule her days and nights, she did her own thing. when she woke up, if she decided it was time to get up, even if it was still dark out. She would get dressed and go and have breakfast or go sit in the front room and read or watch tv.

Living next door, we checked on her in the morning and during the day as we could and then again in the evening. we did the things for her that she could no longer do. But keeping her in bed at night, that we couldn't do because we weren't physically living in this house. She also spent a lot of hours napping during the day, basically because no one was here and she would get lonely or bored. so of course that didn't help her to sleep during the night either.

When we had the fire, the only thing we could do was to move in here, or we would have been homeless. A new chapter in our lives, from a book we never thought we would be reading. That was my grandma's house. She raised her children there, dad and mom raised their family there, (that would include me!)
And i rasied my 4 sons there, and all but one of my 7 grandchildren had spent time there as well. so, that which contained my lifetime of memories, was destroyed.
But, we were well, and now faced with the job of making this little house habitable for the three of us.

We have to sleep on the hide-a-bed in the front room, and many times during the night we would be awakened by the "wanderer". She would wake up, go potty, and decide to get dressed and come out of her room, turn on the kitchen light or walk into the front room, (where we of course aretrying to sleep, funny), go into the bathroom, turn on that light and put her teeth in, then proceed back to the kitchen or her room. Now all this could occur in any sequence and at any time of the night or early morning. Every night we were "chasing" her back to bed at some point! Every night we would waken to the dreaded metallic sounding 'click, click, click' as her walker makes it's way across the kitchen floor, knowing that confrontation was soon to begin again. Sometimes she would just walk into the kitchen, look at the time, turn around and go back to her room and to bed, yeah! However, that was few and far between. This was the nightly routine for about 6 months. Nightly sleep interruptions. Those were the easy nights! I'll share about the really fun ones later!

The weeks following when she broke her ankle, and had the black out episode were very taxing, emtionally and physically. They had affected her mental and physical abilities greatly. She did recover well from the ankle break and walks with her walker again, but mus always have someone near by. Her mental acuity is what it is, and we deal with the 'fuzzy' moments, repeating conversations or information as often as we have to.

She has been totally depended on us since that time, although she will state, "I don't need anyone to look after me!" She still has a great sense of humor. She loves to watch The Chonicles of Narnia, Jumanji and she gets a good chuckle at the Three Stooges! And I can get a good out of her from time to time also. She sai one day, "We sure do have fun here don't we?" and another time she told me I was more fun than a barrel of monkeys! That was months ago, and the realities of caregiving have long sense set it. But we still try to keep the humor going, you have to do that for everyone's sake.

I know the years of sleeping whenever she wanted to, plus her age plus possible side effects of her meds, all have contributed to her wake/sleep cycle being so confused. I have done much study on the matter, trying to find a solution. I did try various things to help and I will talk about them in the next 'chapter'.

Time to go tend to mom. She is watching Narnia, and needs to get her cranberry juice finsihed before she takes her nap.