Prune Abuse and Rock 'N Roll

Thursday, Feb 25, 2010.

I awoke this morning to an orange tinted toilet seat. It looked clean, but it was definitely orange. Hmmm. Odd. Nothing a little hard bleach job couldn't handle.

Wished B a good morning and gave her her pills, Earl was still at the bank having coffee. She thanked me and said she had some other good pills in the cabinet, her fiber laxatives, but that they hadn't been working so well for her lately. She confessed she had had an accident in the wee hours last night. Not from the fiber laxatives, which apparently don't work well enough, but from her old nemesis, PRUNES (insert unhappy face here). And so I had naively thought that she was really over prunes, they are never her friend, but the battle of staying thin rages on even in Alzheimer's-land. Prunes the weapon of choice this time, her body ever the battlefield.

She confessed that she had intentionally abused them, and that this was not the first time. Believe me I know it wasn't the first time. There was a time, before the Depends that this was a weekly if not nightly occurrence, and she would creep into my room bare assed, save the turtleneck (obviously), looking for clean pants. Thank god those days are behind us. So yes, I have had to deal with many a laxative abuse disaster. They are messy. They are NOT fun. You are all very very lucky that I wasn't documenting these great adventures for everyone back in the days before Depends. You would have asked me to stop writing.

Somehow even with the Depends, last night's events proved explosive. She said she messed the whole bathroom (often we get a splatter effect all the way over onto the tub somehow... don't ask, that bathroom is like the Mystery Spot of fecal matter, no laws of nature apply). I told her she should have gotten me up to help her out, but she is stubborn and was embarrassed (understandably) and didn't want anyone to know. I am still boggled as to why she told me any of this after going through the painstaking efforts to hide it all. Oh sweet dementia. Somehow she had managed to "clean" this one up on her own without waking either Earl or me, she said she even scrubbed the carpet with carpet cleaner! Christ, it must have taken her all night. She can barely get on or off the couch, lord knows how she got down on her knees to scrub the carpet. The carpet was spotless this morning! Just WOW.

Anyways... after she spilled me her secrets, I asked her to play me a song on the "fun machine" (electric organ) to show me the ropes. This lifted her spirits considerably. She started playing "I Don't Know Who Holds Tomorrow" (a catchy, albeit churchy kinda hymn) from sheet music, and was playing pretty well considering her gnarled arthritic fingers. Earl came home while she was toying around and sang a bit for us. He has an AWESOME deep old-man voice, and I am trying to convince him that the three of us should start a band (I am also trying to convince him to go skydiving with me for his 86th birthday, which he seriously considered, with a big ol' grin, for about five whole minutes... then shut me down... *sigh*... baby steps). Tomorrow, if BB can remember stuff, I get my first organ lesson, peddling some sweet synth outa that fun machine. ROCK OUT!!!