In BB's House

Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010.

I didn’t sleep that well last night, so if I’m prickly today that’s why. BB came home from her MRI yesterday dazed and tired, it was scheduled for late in the day, 7pm, but we got to watch Wheel Of Fortune in the waiting room (Earl is a damn genius) and that calmed any potential nerves. They took her down the hall in a wheelchair, as her walking is very slow now. The procedure was long and tedious as she couldn’t hold still and what should have taken 15-20 minutes tops took more than an hour to complete. I didn’t know it at the time but the process had really traumatized her and has affected her outlook and experience today greatly. We came back from the appointment, had some cake, watched The Bodyguard on TV (LOL) and then retired for the night. I wrote some emails and went to sleep.

At about 3am this morning I awoke to the all too familiar smell of okra burning. I know this smell well, and I thought we had fixed this problem by talking to her about the dangers of middle of the night Alzheimer’s cooking. She had stopped this behavior for a few weeks and I assumed we were in the all clear. I got up to investigate the situation. B was sound asleep in her bed and sure enough there was a pot on the stove festering away with no water left to steam. I turned it off, turned out the light, and tried to go back to sleep. I could not. Lying there in the dark, restless and thinking about burning alive, I heard her get up again, the rhythm of hard breathing and slow shuffling feet, which I have affectionately begun referring to as “the night stalker” (I’ve been working on a kickass heavy metal song… NIIIIIIIGHT STALKER… BURNIN’ DOWN THE HOUUUUUUSE!!!) I could hear her getting busy in the kitchen, got up and found her there dutifully cleaning up the evidence. I asked her what she was doing and she lied to my face about having cooked it ever so watchfully but that it was done now. I told her I had turned it off while she was sleeping, and it had burned. She became hostile with me and accused me of lying so I just went back to bed. I didn’t sleep much last night.

I awoke. A bit surly. Tired. Exhausted. Earl was at the bank having coffee as usual, BB was still in bed, which is not like her for this time in the morning but is quickly becoming the norm. I greeted her, “mornin’ B” and went to shower. When I had dressed Earl was back. “Mornin’ Earl.” “Mornin’ Luci.” The burned okra sat on the stove in a strainer in a different pot. She had raided the garage freezer in the night, and she had found and eaten another entire box of fudgesicles (so that was two boxes eaten yesterday), left empty in the freezer marked with several chocolate paw prints.

I put out B’s pills and met with a harsh resistance for the first time since I have been administering them to her. BB was really upset about the MRI scan the night before and was cranky and hurting and a bit delirious. She didn’t want to do anymore of this hospital business, and could definitely handle her own pills. She didn’t need me telling her what to do and accused me of “knowing everything” and taking ill charge of the house. I told her I would leave if she really didn’t want me there, if that’s how she wanted it I would go. I looked at earl to show my sympathy for her pain and felt my eyes watering up, just sad that things were so hard for her and that she was so confused. It’s hard to watch her struggle with anger, and frustrated on top of it that the words and sentences are becoming hard to get out. She then assured us that she did not cook that okra, and I had lied about finding it cooking on the stove unwatched. I hadn’t even brought it up at all at this point. Frustrated, I went to the bathroom, cried some pity tears, composed myself and returned to the kitchen.

Then I made the mistake of asking BB if she wanted me to save this okra in the fridge or if I should throw it away (I always ask her about throwing stuff away because she gets strangely attached to things, like a bottle of mouthwash that sat in our bathroom for over a month with a GIANT dead fly in it, which I was NOT supposed to throw away under any circumstances). She said she would eat this burned okra and asked why the hell (she has been cursing more and more lately) I’d want to throw it away. This started a whole mess about the okra I don’t even want to rehash. For about the next half hour there was dire confusion about the state of okra in the house. We kept explaining we would cook some okra again. We weren’t eradicating the house of okra, just throwing that particular pot of it away. She was really sad when she thought we weren’t going to eat okra at all anymore and was desperately trying to figure out what else she could eat to help with her “elimination” (another decidedly popular subject), and this frustration led to her becoming belligerent and violent, threatening to throw the okra pot first at us, then through the glass window. Thank god Bonanza came on at that point and she stopped shouting in order to watch. Started the okra talk again at commercial but I gave her the newspaper and she simmered back down.

Once the paper was done she decided that prunes would be good for her elimination. She had to have some prunes, and right now!!! I volunteered to go on the prune mission, as I was already craving a breakfast burrito from Sonic. Got my boots on, keys in hand and then she no longer wanted the prunes. They gave her diarrhea. She admitted to intentionally abusing them to disastrous results, we spoke of rationing them to avoid this problem. No. Diarrhea. Bad. She wanted okra. We had okra. And so I went to get Earl and I burritos.

By the time I returned Earl had fixed B some eggs (she has recently stopped cooking them for herself everyday) and the three of us sat down together and had a nice breakfast. She started talking again about the MRI and how much she had hated it, and how now because of it her back hurt. And I began to realize just how deeply the experience had traumatized her. I reassured her that it was over and she could forget about it now. But the story of it continued to haunt the rest of the day, over and over again. Cortney called and I went back to my room, cried for a bit again just to let the frustration and sadness out.

I struggle with feeling sad a lot. It is strange for me because I am not a sad or depressed person. It is weird because I thoroughly enjoy each day spent here. I realized a while ago that it is not my own sadness that I feel, but sadness for her. Watching this once so vibrant woman, so spirited and intelligent, my own grandmother, whom I love more than most anyone fall so far from being herself, from knowing herself. From being able to communicate what she feels, losing the use of simple words, losing whole sentences. Watching her fall farther each day. It is incredibly sad. It will be sad reading these journals FYI. It may bum you out but this is just the plain reality of what happens around here. Don’t be sad for me, I know how to find the beauty in all of this, as you will see. These are the eyes and ears talking here, just the facts observed and sometimes the feelings.

Soon enough it was time to go to the doctor. This was met with little resistance as the hospital had called to inform us her appointment was switched from Dr. Heart to Alana, her regular nurse practitioner. She liked seeing the hospital, her old stomping grounds, but had trouble remembering who was who. “I know you! Who are you?!!!”

Earl filled out the paperwork this time. They checked her vitals. Oxygen was 100%, a miracle for an 82 year old who’s admittedly been a smoker for 76 years. Height has shrunk. She now weighs more than Earl who at 5’11” has become thin and frail. Alana (“pronounced like banana”) took a look at her meds, and like Dr. Dickerson wondered why she had stopped taking potassium. This had not been instructed; B had chosen to eliminate this on her own, most likely because she forgot about it. Alana said that now that she was taking her meds she wanted her to return in a week to test her potassium levels in her blood, and see if it needs to be added back in. She kept all the medicines she has been taking this week in the cocktail, and then looked at what else B had stopped taking. They were allergy and asthma meds that were only to be taken when needed, not daily, but put them back on the regime of pills for when they are necessary.

She is now currently taking once daily: Aricept (for Alzheimer’s), Plavix (as prescribed by the doctor in Houston for stroke), Furosemide (for water clearance, and where the potassium comes in play to balance the effects), and Celecoxib (for arthritis). She has a prescription for Allegra (for allergies when necessary) and has just been given an antibiotic to take for 10 days to help with what Alana suspects is an upper respiratory infection, aka Snotty McGee.

I also spoke with Vivian about getting some in-home care. We were given the same list as before, dated September, and she told me to try the Senior Help Center in Abilene to look for other options. She mentioned that a woman had come in today looking to do home care work and that she gave her an application and is awaiting it’s return, upon which we will be contacted for an interview. So there is some looking into this to be done, but as usual, BB was once again not accepting this idea. Earl and I explained to her that she at least has a choice in this matter: accept the help or go to a nursing home, plain and simple and her choice to make. Based on that part of the discussion I think she is willing to try the help. Hopefully it will not be met with more resistance, but I doubt it. Each day there is a deep struggle with this issue.

Dinner was a bit tough tonight, I usually just cook and serve but we had a lot of leftovers out to choose from and she could not make a decision on what she wanted to eat. “I don’t know… I don’t know… what is this here? What?”… all while fingering the food we were all sharing. This is a huge issue for me that I struggle with daily. She has a serious obsessive compulsion to touch any food she sees when walking by it. Asking what it is has not been enough; she absolutely HAS TO touch it. This is a huge sanitary issue for me because she constantly blows her nose in her hands and never washes them, just wipes them off. I have been working on getting her into hand washing, also met with severe resistance and belligerence. Anyway, I had a rough day already so I let the touching food lecture slide as I didn’t want another fight, just decided to not eat any meat at all, and have a quiet dinner. Earl had to fix her plate as she was unable to make a decision, and she actually ate what was on it so that was good.

After dinner we watched Shane, a good old western she’s seen many times. “Who is that?” “That’s Allen Ladd, Bobbie.” “Oh ok.”… “Earl, now, who is that?” “THAT”S ALLEN LADD.” “Oh ok”… continuing on that way throughout the duration of the film. She became pretty talkative after the movie and was talking to me about her son, my dad, about his life, my life, how we used to fight, but how we get along now and it’s so great. Then she asked me if Dad and I had been married. “You were married, right? You and your dad, married weren’t you?” Shocked, I explained her that that would be more than a little weird and no we had never been married. Earl and I tried to hide our laughter of the sheer insanity of it. She was so certain of it. Well, I guess it’s just another one of those utterly crazy moments that we have been having more and more of lately.

A movie about POWs came on next. The prisoners had gotten an egg somehow and cooked it and were all drooling over it and Earl recounted how he had got an egg somehow on his birthday but he couldn’t remember how he got it. I started talking to him about how good it must have been to have an egg and asking how he had cooked it, and he told me about a makeshift stove they had made with tin cans they hid from the Nazis.

Then Earl made my night by bringing out his POW mementos, the books written on Stalag Luft IV and their 600 mile “march of death” through Germany. He held them first, finding a choice cartoon in one of the books and handed it to me. It depicted some prisoners, one in his underwear, barbwire fence around barracks, and some strange cart like thing with a hose and a clear explosion coming out the top of it. “What’s that?” I asked. In a German accent he replied “Schizer-vagon.” I almost suffocated laughing so hard. My little knowledge of the German language basically only includes the word schizer and wagon is self-explanatory. It was a cartoon of the prison camp’s “shit wagon” and it was exploding from the top. He explained that they had to make it explode to create a vacuum to suck the schizer out of the latrines. He delighted in his recollections of how the loud bang would always scare the new-bee prisoners. I delighted in the idea of schizer explosions.

He then handed me the whole stack of stuff and told me I could take my time checking it out. I picked up this little gambling ticket leaflet, inside there were war poems written on a Lucky Strikes cigarette wrapper, a Nazi postal paper, on other scraps of paper all folded delicately into this small little cardstock pouch. I unfolded each one carefully and realized they were accounts, poems, and notes written while he had been a prisoner. He acknowledged this upon my query and said some were from the camp and some were from the “march of death.” He had notes of how many kilometers they had marched each day, of how many prisoners died that day, how many Nazis were shot, and a few large print excited scribes, the first I found was “British liberated us today!” and the second hidden deep in the booklet was “April 13 ate a fried egg today. Mary’s birthday. One year old.” The very egg he had remembered eating earlier had been on his daughter’s birthday, not his own. He had never met his daughter at this point as she’d been born after his deployment. His handwriting was so excited it glowed on the page practically blinding out the routine tallies of kilometers marched logged.

This was a special, extremely personal thing to have let me so casually flip through. It made my day and I think Earl had given it to me for this specific purpose. I asked him if I could really hold onto this stuff for a while and read it all and he said yes! I still cant believe what a gift has been bestowed me. I needed some cheering up today and I think I got it.